


Parabellum

by sifshadowheart



Category: John Wick (Movies), Stargate - All Media Types, Stargate Atlantis, The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Alpha Prime Jack O'Neill, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Amoral Stiles Stilinski, BAMF Stiles, Canon? What Canon?, F/F, F/M, Gen, Intersex Characters, Long Live Rarepairs!, M/M, Multi, Primal Guide Stiles, Ruthless Stiles Stilinski, Slash, Stealing Characters from Every Fandom Under the Sun, Threesome - M/M/M, Timeline What Timeline, Writer Threw Things into a Blender and Hit High Speed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:02:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24989494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sifshadowheart/pseuds/sifshadowheart
Summary: The first visitors the Earth ever knew were the Alterans, an advanced alien race who seeded two galaxies with life in their own image - even as they fled from their mistakes, leaving their abandoned children and aborted experiments to struggle without them.First among their descendants were the Tau'ri - humans of Earth who had spawned a secondary evolution when their creators weren't watching: Sentinels and Guides, stretching back as far as humanity could remember or their artifacts recalled, their protectors and defenders facing every threat from without *or* within.All that came after: Ori, Replicators, Goa'uld, Wraith; slavers, Nazi, colonizers, NID, the Trust; all came to find that the first obstacle was never the last, not so long as the Sentinels, Guides, and their Council still lived.So it made sense that the greatest defender Earth had when they realized that humanity wasn't alone in their universe was a Sentinel.Just as it was fitting that the greatest protector all of humanity had would be a Guide, whose fierce loyalty was almost as legendary as his ruthlessness.And then there was Atlantis: the Lost City, abandoned and waiting for her people to return.
Relationships: Daniel Jackson/Rodney McKay, Jim Ellison/Blair Sandburg, Other Relationship Tags to Be Added, Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill, Sheriff Stilinski & Stiles Stilinski, Stiles Stilinski & John Wick, Stiles Stilinski/John Sheppard/Ronon Dex
Comments: 63
Kudos: 362
Collections: Ashes' Library





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Eight Years](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22975552) by [misteeirene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misteeirene/pseuds/misteeirene). 



> Welcome to my Wish-Fulfillment Ultimate Multicrossover!
> 
> Now, the main questions I always get when I dip into something new - and this is a new project for me with new tropes almost entirely from start-to-finish - is "do I have to be familiar with fandom x to follow the story?"
> 
> So, for this big of a project, I've curated a few YouTube clips and AMVs to give readers some insight into the background principles I'm working with as well as a couple of story rec's.
> 
> John Wick: https://youtu.be/Ij1778c7hUc  
> https://youtu.be/qIalODmFrZk  
> Stiles: https://youtu.be/TmOLZa1rGG8  
> https://youtu.be/hkYgz4Pwa-0  
> SGA: http://quantumbang.org/janus-two-step-1-2-ladyholder/  
> http://keiramarcos.com/category/fandom/stargate-atlantis/  
> The Sentinel/SGA fusion: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20271496
> 
> Now, I haven't linked anything for Teen Wolf outside of the two Stiles AMVs because I'm using TW characters in a non-TW supernatural world. So no werewolves, sparks, nogitsune, etc.
> 
> Honestly in my opinion the Sentinel fandom has more than enough mysticism and the Stargate fandom enough tech that might as well be magic without throwing in actual magic as well.
> 
> Two things to keep in mind for this fic are: Canon? What Canon? as well as my second favorite: What is a Timeline???
> 
> And as with any multifandom crossover, the suspension of disbelief is always helpful.

**Parabellum**

**Prologue: The Bogeyman and Little Death**

_Approximately Nineteen Years Ago:_

“Claudia?”

“ _Jandani_. I- I need to meet with you.”

“Claudia, what’s wrong?”

“ _Jandani_...I need to call in my Marker…”

…

_Now:_

“ _This will be good for us, Mieszko._ ” The newly-minted Stiles Mieczysław Wick heard his father’s grief-laden voice ringing in his ears as he stepped into their new home - a shared accommodation in the Stargate Command barracks. He hadn’t been thrilled at the idea of giving up their old life entirely, letting go of everything they knew even to the point of John being reenlisted in the United States Marine Corps where Mieczysław was currently a First Lieutenant. The Marines - or another branch of the military - was standard for people like _them,_ a way to explain skills that were almost impossible to gain outside of either the military complex or any one of hundreds of criminal organizations. “ _A clean break._ ”

Considering the river of blood they’d sent spilling into Little Russia over the course of three day days, now one week old and the bodies either in ashes or the ground, he’d caved to the grief and need for a true fresh start, resolve crumpling in the joint efforts of his commanding officer, the Sentinel and Guide Council, _and_ the second in command of the Stargate program himself, Colonel Jack O’Neill of the United States Air Force.

Last time his father had wanted out of their old life, John had stayed in the suburbs, in the same house they’d lived in since Mieszko was three years old and was adopted by John, and still allowed Mieszko to attend his “lessons” with the Ruska Roma and some of his old friends.

John had bought his original retirement - with Mieszko’s help - with a river of blood and a mountain of bodies only to get sucked back by a cocky idiot with a death wish.

He wasn’t taking that chance again, not now that he’d seen for himself just how _not_ retired his son was from the life that almost reclaimed John.

If anything onlining as a guide after spending the last several years in the military running everything from Black Ops to SpecOps with his Recon team had only made John’s son _more_ dangerous not less.

Not that they had much of a choice about their _retirement_ \- utter this time and final - between Colonel O’Neill and the Council. Due to the circumstances of their joint onlining as a sentinel and guide (respectively, John and Mieczysław) followed by them tearing through Little Russia on an unsanctioned _hunt,_ well, short of disappearing completely the government had them dead to rights. Which they could do. But...then there was the other thing.

The _abduction_ thing. The being reunited with his biological father thing. The not wanting to leave his Recon team without their leader thing.

And the near-dead look in his Tata’s eyes when John had shot Iosef, _that_ thing too.

For his part, John was seemingly intent on reclaiming a bit of the peace that Helen, John’s late wife and the only mother Mieszko could remember clearly, had tried so hard to give both of her hard-bitten, cynical, dark humored menfolk while avoiding even _looking_ at Mieczysław’s apparent bio-father.

Even if John had to drag his son across the country and into the utter unknown: _literally_ given the mandate of the Stargate program, instead of the facade of a quiet life John and Mieszko had projected over the latter’s “dance” lessons with Ruska Roma and his “tutoring” sessions with Marcus, Charon, and Winston at the Continental before Mieczysław had enlisted.

Which, granted, there had been actual dance lessons and tutoring going on, Mieszko and John alike were far too bad at flat-out lying to Helen for an utter deception, it was just that that hadn’t been _all_ that was going on.

She’d known about the college studies - she couldn’t _not_ since she helped John hide a lot of it under various names to keep him off of gifted kid lists - but the _other_ bit...yeah. Mieczysław hadn’t said _shit_ about that between the time of his “retirement” with John and when he’d left for Basic Training at eighteen to his mom.

That Mieszko had applied for - and been granted - a membership at the Continental on his own merit when he turned sixteen and had just...never gotten around to telling his father was merely more fuel on John’s fire to haul them far from New York where John’s contacts and connections tended to become or act like Mieszko’s contacts and connections given how long they’d known him.

Thank whatever gods that had been listening that while John had found out about the membership - Charon let it “slip” on purpose the sneaky bastard - he hadn’t found out that Mieszko had taken and completed several accounts that Winston or Charon or the Director of Ruska Roma had personally curated for him as being low risk but high paying because of the level of skill required to keep them low risk.

 _And_ that Stargate Command was ignorant about the actual origins of their family’s (of two, but still) _specialized training_ , the Marine Corps entirely pleased and content to take absolute credit for their skills, even if that they both went a bit feral after coming online and tore through a mafia family _wasn’t_ the sort of thing that anyone liked to claim or admit to.

Almost as if he could read his mind, John turned and looked at his son - who’d managed to outgrow him by an inch over the last year - and shook his head as Mieszko had never looked more like a kid instead of a world renowned professional assassin and Scout Sniper in the Marine Corps than he did in that moment with a pouty look on his face, All Stars on his feet, and a red hoodie draping his broad shoulders.

Granted, there was at least two garrotes sewn into that plain red hoodie and a handful of knives secreted in his son’s clothes and accessories, but that pout over being forced into _taking a transfer he was being considered for anyway_ was every inch the put-upon son and not the deadly killer or decorated officer with a military file that contained more black blocks than actual text - much to the frustration of the Sentinel and Guide Council.

The military _loved_ utilizing sentinels and guides, they made for outstanding soldiers given their imperatives to defend and protect, but in the end even the highest decorated and most dutiful sentinel or guide belonged to the Council first (after immediate family/spouse) and everyone else a distant second. That gave the Council a level of both control and access to military operations that not _everyone_ was pleased with. Even so, there were some things the Council _didn’t_ want to know about. It was a fine line and balance everyone worked to maintain, but there were still moments of tension.

Like having a pair of highly trained and deadly SpecOps/BlackOps Marines go online and proceed to carve a swathe of blood through Little Russia and the Council not be allowed to know what was in their pasts to explain their _extreme_ level of efficiency at creating a bloodbath.

“You’ll survive, Mieszko.” John reached over and patted his shoulder as Mieszko just shrugged and glanced around the small two-person quarters in their new base of operations in Cheyenne Mountain. “It’s only for the rest of your contract. You can give me that: knowing you’re free - instead of tossed down a black site or in solitary at Leavenworth - after everything.”

“It’s not that.” Mieszko sighed, dropping his arms and running one hand through his warm brown hair that he wore within regulations - if only just considering the length on top and short sides. John wasn’t looking forward to a trip to the barber in the morning but knew it was inevitable and part of the _deal_ that kept both of them free, if nominal property of the USMC. “It’s this place. Something about it is...unsettling.”

“Aliens, wormholes, government conspiracies.” John rattled off with an arch of his brow. His own instincts were highly honed as both an assassin and a sentinel - albeit a new one in the latter case - but his son’s tended to have an edge to them that even John couldn’t match. Likely from having to gauge his birth mother’s mood swings and mental status to survive. At least until he came into John’s care. If Mieszko felt unsafe to him they’d be out of there so fast all anyone would see was dust, _agreement_ with the Council and SGC be damned. “Or the part about your birth father staring at you with his heart and almost two decades of grief in his eyes?”

Mieczysław grimaced in wordless answer, even as he set to squaring away his half of the quarters from BDUs in drawers to dress uniforms in the closet.

It wasn’t _his_ fault that by the time he’d turned eighteen Noah Stilinski had joined the Stargate program and disappeared from even their abilities to locate.

He’d thought the man was dead or had decided to disappear.

Given that his mentally ill wife had kidnapped their son and then turned up dead two weeks later from self-inflicted wounds, Mieczyslaw wouldn’t have blamed him if it was the latter.

“Well,” John shifted, coming over to rest his hands on his son’s shoulders, staring him soberly in the eye. “There was never any way to track him beyond what we already did once he joined SGC and from what we’ve been told he’s been waiting for you to pop on a Guide DNA intake for almost twenty years. We can’t get back what’s lost, Mieszko, but if we don’t want to spend the _rest_ of our lives running, we _both_ need to at least try to make this work.”

“Okay, Tata.” Mieszko smiled crookedly, feeling something inside him settle. Even if he was a grown man and guide, there was something about his Tata that grounded him - much like Mieszko now grounded John’s sentinel abilities as his child despite the two of them not sharing DNA. Their familial bond was _more_ than strong enough to manage it, even when straight science said it shouldn’t. “Two years of unrequested danger, coming up. I’ll be as boring and normal of a crazy assed Scout Sniper as anyone raised by Baba Yaga and the Director can manage.”

“That’s my boy.” John pulled him in for a brief hug, their new dog tags - John's with a red rubber edge protector to mark him as a sentinel and Mieszko's with the blue for a guide instead of the mundane plain black both had worn before - clinking softly before they pulled apart and got back to settling in.

Cheyenne Mountain, new home of Baba Yaga and Konetsko, also known as - thanks to a _bit_ of digital finagling, political bullshit, and more than a bit of extortion - Gunnery Sergeant John Wick and his son First Lieutenant Stiles Mieczysław Wick, United States Marine Corps.

May whatever gods the SGC listened and/or appealed to have mercy on their souls.

…

“How was your first day in guide training with Sandburg?” John asked as his son strode into their shared quarters the next evening.

John, as a Sigma Class Sentinel, nominally considered the “lone wolves” of sentinel and guide society, was taking his classes on dealing with his new senses and imperatives and instincts in the Mountain with a handful of other new or soon-to-be online sentinels. His prior training - all of it, even the significant amount of off-books crap that even the SGC’s hackers wouldn’t be able to find, the same for Mieczysław regarding the, ah, illegal aspects of their former lives - had prepared him well for much of what was covered in the classes. He’d always been latent, and after he hit forty he thought he always would be.

That was what the _science_ of sentinels and guides said after all.

Not so much.

Mieczysław though...John and Helen - God rest her soul - had always figured he’d online sooner or later.

Honestly, given all the shit they’ve seen, been through, and _done_ , John was surprised that either a) neither of them had gone dormant, or b) that Mieczysław hadn’t come online sooner.

Twenty-two wasn’t late for a guide to come online, if anything it was a bit young outside of those who come online in puberty and threw off the data when included, but a sentinel coming online at almost fifty was nearly unheard of.

“Done.” Mieszko wrinkled his nose. “Blair says my readings and power levels, plus my behavior…” He sighed, shaking his head as he plopped onto his bunk. _Behavior_ was a polite way to put him joining his Tata in murdering their way through the Tarasov crime family and their goons, plus his aggression towards the handful of sentinels that have crowded him since then. Scent-drunk idiots. Just because guides smelled/looked/felt good to sentinels didn’t mean that Stiles wanted them sniffing around him. He’s _grieving_ for fuck’s sake, despite everyone seeming to forget that bit in focusing on what came after his Mom’s funeral. “He’s saying Primal, Tata.”

John lifted his brows in shock, blinking. “There hasn’t been a Primal Guide in…”

“Generations,” Mieczysław - _Stiles_ , John needed to get used to calling him Stiles now - waved a hand. “Yeah, that’s what he said. He _also_ said that Primals always bond with Alpha Prime Sentinels, and as all the Alpha Primes on records are already matched up and bonded…”

“You think they haven’t emerged yet.”

 _“They_ might be the operative word.” Stiles muttered to himself, thinking about the _other_ bomb Blair had dropped on him, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Primals arise for war, Tata. That’s what we’re _for._ We’re not emotionally or mentally supportive, counselors, or any other kind of traditional Shaman imperatives despite having Shaman level power.” At least not as their primary imperatives. “If Alpha Primes tend to have psionic skills, Primals apparently were/are the warrior guide version.”

Which means this galactic _war_ that Earth and its allies were waging against the Goa'uld might get _significantly_ worse if Stiles was only now emerging despite it going on for a decade.

Or, and Stiles hated to think about it but he saw the same suspicion written on his Tata’s face, that there was _something else_ even worse waiting out in the black.

“Well,” John opened the hidden panel on the interior of their shared closet kitty-corner to where his son was resting that he’d finished installing earlier, showing the mini-arsenal - one of a dozen hidden throughout the country, including their personal arsenals in their footlockers. One of the concessions they’d managed to wrangle for themselves from the SGC and Council when it became clear that they were far more valuable to them than John had initially assumed, especially once those in power recognized that one or both of them could disappear without a trace if they so desired. “You know what they say: if you want peace…”

“ _Parabellum_.”

Prepare for war.

…

_Tarasov Mob Headquarters; Ten Days Prior_

“So I stole a car! So fuckin’ what?!”

Iosef Tarasov hit his knees as the swift uppercut of his father’s strong fist hit his stomach for the second time in less than a minute as his father ignored him and rounded the bar, resettling his jacket precisely in place 

“It’s not what you did. It’s who you did it _to_.” The black - but blank - expression that Viggo, head of his Family, had kept in place through confronting his idiot of a son never wavered for a second. He already knew how this was going to end. There was only one way for it to end.

Even so: a man must do what a man must do. John would act, his son would act, Viggo would respond, John’s son would respond. It would end only one way: in rivers of blood.

Viggo was not so foolish to think that with all his power and all his men that his Family would survive unscathed.

Not now.

Not with what Iosef had done - and as he was about to make clear exactly who Iosef had done it to.

Not with the rumors regarding a pair of _Sentinel and Guide_ who’d onlined and sent shockwaves for miles around their home. Rumors that said Baba Yaga had finally emerged despite having lived his life latent. A rare thing to happen to men like them, most of their kind remaining latent or going dormant because of the lives they lead. That his son had followed him, in a double surprise.

And all because Viggo’s son was a _fucking idiot._

“Who? That fuckin’ nobody and his mouthy kid?”

“That fuckin’ nobody and his mouthy kid, are John and Mieczyslaw Wick.” Viggo pronounced the names with the precision one would expect to accompany a death sentence. Which, in actuality, it was. “John once was an associate of ours, his son trained with Ruska Roma and the staff at the Continental, once he became of age to be useful in the field he became John’s partner - at his own insistence and against John’s wishes no less. We called them Baba Yaga and Konetsko.”

“The Boogeyman and Little Death?”

“Well, John wasn’t exactly the Bogeyman. He was the one you sent to kill the _fucking_ Bogeyman. Mieszko on the other hand was most aptly named by the Director. An angel’s innocent face with the devil’s own wrath though last I heard he wasn’t so little anymore.”

He’d taken the standard _out_ for many young ones born into this life, joining the military and keeping his head down, refusing all but the most vital contracts that the Continental sourced for him ever since.

No, Viggo would imagine that the last thing Mieczysław Wick was any longer was _little._

Though being a two-natured young one, it was entirely possible that he was diminutive, despite having long reached his maturity.

Viggo would assume so given his son’s preferences, but very well could be wrong as Mieszko had had all the markers of growing into a stunning man that would turn heads wherever he went.

“Oh.” Iosef’s face - and eyes that were slowly filling with fear and not just of his father’s temper - made it clear he was starting to realize just how deep into the shit he’d landed himself.

The unimpressed glance his father shot him said it was about damn time, moving to stand toe to toe with his son.

“John was a man of focus _without_ the blessing of the Sentinel he now possesses. One of commitment. Sheer will. Mieszko learned well at his father’s knee with an intelligence that even as a child could send chills down my spine. All things you know very little about. I once saw John kill three men in a bar with a pencil. A fucking _pencil._ Mieszko made his first kill at five hundred yards with an Enfield when he was ten years old. Fucking _ten_. To provide cover fire and save his father’s life when an employer tried to fuck him over despite there being another sniper sitting right next to him able and willing to take the shot. Then suddenly one day, John asked to leave. Over a woman of course. The love of his life, a mother for his son. So I made a deal with him. I gave him an impossible task. A job no one could have pulled off. The bodies they buried that day laid the foundation for what we are now. John had his retirement and Mieszko stayed active with Ruska Roma and was granted membership to the Continental eventually under his own right and name upon completing his apprenticeship. He eventually went into the military and that, we all thought, was that. And then, _my son_ , a few days after John’s wife’s death, his _beloved_ ’s death, after the only mother Mieszko ever knew was laid to rest, you steal John’s car, call Mieczysław all kinds of foulness, threaten to _rape_ him, and _then kill their fuckin’_ _dog_.”

“Father, I can make this right!” Iosef pleaded, seeing clearly for the first time the truth of things. This wasn’t about confronting him over a fuck up. This was Viggo washing his hands of his son. A disownment in all but name.

“Oh, how do you plan to do that?” Viggo cocked his head to the side, though he already knew what Iosef would say. As if it was that easy. And he was right.

“By finishing what I started.”

“Ah,” Viggo looked in exasperation at his lawyer, gesturing to his son in frustration like _‘can you believe this kid?’_ “didn’t hear a fucking thing I said!”

“Dad, I can do this! Please!”

“Just listen!” He grabbed his son, pulling and holding him close, whispering in his ear. “John and Mieszko will come for you. And you will do _nothing_. Because you _can_ do nothing. So get the fuck out of my sight!”

…


	2. Chapter 2

**Parabellum**

**Chapter One: Rivers of Blood**

_Approximately Nineteen Years Ago:_

John Wick walked into the suite at the New York Continental with strict caution.

He’d given out only _one_ Marker in his entire life. Only _once_ had he deemed the service and favor rendered to him as both a man and an assassin worthy of any task that might be asked of it. And when the holder of said Marker had left the service of the High Table and the criminal underworld that group monitored and controlled, he’d thought that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Claudia had called him and set a meeting at the New York Continental to call in the Marker.

The Marker he’d given her in thanks for smuggling him to the Ruska Roma when he was only a boy and his status as a latent Sentinel was uncovered by the Belarusan government after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the modern day governments involved with the United Nations and the International Sentinel and Guide Council may no longer _openly_ take “protective custody” of latent children, but that hadn’t always been the case. Add in John’s heritage as a member of the Romani and the ethnic cleansing running rampant in Eastern Europe at the time, and John did not doubt for a moment that the older girl had saved his life. In the hands of the regimes that arose during the time, John - or Jandani as he’d been then - would have either been killed outright for his heritage or twisted and controlled for his latency into little more than a drone without will of his own.

That didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t wary of what she’d decided twenty years later she wanted in return.

Given that as he walked into the suite and saw Claudia had requested both the Director of Ruska Roma - all seemingly ancient and ageless with her creping skin and piercingly cold eyes - and Winston, the immovable Manager of the New York branch of the Continental to play witness and guarantors of the Marker, he felt rightfully vindicated for his paranoia.

And then he smelled the heady sweetness of a latent child, despite his own latency, reaching out and wrapping demanding tendrils around his instincts to shelter and protect, and nearly cursed.

Caught, as much by his own nature as a pair of bright amber eyes peeped up over the back of a sofa across the room as he was by the Marker itself.

Without saying a word, John lowered himself carefully into the chair left open for him, those bright eyes watching him every step of the way with far too much intelligence than he was used to from such a small child - even if the most interaction he ever had with _children_ was when he passed them on the street.

Claudia set the silver Marker on the coffee table that the four of them surrounded, the sofa with its small charge positioned behind her, and then revealed another one that had Winston arching a brow as while the first one was placed between her and John as expected, the second was between Claudia and the Director.

Interesting.

John had assumed when she’d left their life that it had taken all of her chits but his Marker to manage it - though he’d never known she held one from the Director to begin with.

It wasn’t entirely a shock however.

Claudia Wrona - as she’d been then - had been one of the finest runners John had ever worked with, able to courier information and arrange both infiltration and extractions alike with ease.

He didn’t know what she’d done for the Director, though he could make certain inferences given that like him the Director was Romani, but he didn’t doubt that whatever it was, the price Claudia was about to demand for it was fair as unlike John, the Director while stoic was also at relative ease for the prickly and exacting woman.

“We all know why the High Table allowed me to leave service.” Claudia began with a once-smooth and bright voice worn rough from screams and tears alike.

John hated it. This _shadow_ of a once-vital and bedazzling woman. Her vivacity as a girl, then a teen, then a young woman had been one of the few bright spots in his life during a period where he struggled to pull his head above water rather than drown in his rage.

But he couldn’t argue with her and didn’t need to ask how it had happened.

As she said: they all knew.

 _Instability_ is what it had began as, a near death-knell to people like them. Paranoia. Delusions. Depressive and manic episodes.

It went without saying that in a world like theirs, it was an intolerable weakness that some would have chosen to kill her for rather than release.

“Paranoid schizophrenia.” Claudia sneered over the words, feeling markedly lucid for once. A thing that had become all too rare since her son’s birth and the pregnancy that had preceded it. Going off her meds for him had seemed like a small sacrifice. Now that she was staring down the consequences of it as her mind tore itself and her apart, she still didn’t regret her little Mischief, even if she wished that the results of her sickness were not so severe and extreme. Forcing her to take severe and extreme measures in turn. “I can no longer trust my own mind. One moment I fear for my life. The next I believe that my son is going to kill me. The next that my husband will kill us _both._ I do not know fact from delusion any longer. With my _skills_ , I fear for what I will do to one, either, or both of them. And because of my illness, I no longer trust even my husband.”

Fierce eyes, nearly identical to the ones watching her sadly and with far too much _knowing_ in them, locked first on the Director and then on John.

“So I call in my Markers. You.” She stared down her original trainer in the Director. “You will train my son as you once trained me. Trained Jandani. Then you will release him when he completes his apprenticeship with whoever Jandani chooses. There will be no _deals_ , no strings. Once he is trained, he will be free. _Both_ of you,” Claudia looked between the pair. “Will _ensure_ that he is not found by my husband. If he chooses to look for himself once he is a man, that will be his choice. Until then: nothing.” Claudia then turned to John. “And you will be his new father. You will teach him, and shelter him, and protect him with all the fierceness I know you are capable of Jandani. _That_ is the price I put on my Markers.”

Winston nodded solemnly as they all knew his purpose was to play witness - and exact a blood price if her Markers were not carried out as she’d wished.

“So it shall be done.”

_…_

_New York Sacred Heart Hospice, Two Weeks Ago:_

“I told you not to come,” Helen Wick whispered as she opened tired eyes and met those of gleaming amber.

Normally those strange light brown eyes with their hints and flecks of gold danced with mischief or shone with a quicksilver intelligence beyond anything Helen had ever known in all her years as an educator.

Today they were dark with grief as the man she’d met as a too-smart pre-teen with a flashing smile and a _far_ too agile facility for half-truths sat at the side of her hospice bed.

Helen had never considered before her diagnosis that one day she would leave _both_ her boys behind.

Not once.

If anything, when she’d thought far into the future, her mind had been filled with quiet nights with John’s strong arms wrapped around her and days where a dozen grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren made cookies with her in the kitchen while Mieszko taught the rest to cheat at cards and John snoozed in a chair with a dog at his feet.

Those idle musings were long gone now.

Drowned and smothered under words like “Stage Four” and “non-responsive.”

No, now her boys were going to have to learn to live without her gentle nagging to do more than work or study, or Mieszko being bullied to eat and John to laugh.

She had an idea for that, as while Mieszko (she trusted) had gotten leave from his commanding officer for a short leave, she doubted that it would last long enough for John to even _begin_ to drag himself out of mourning.

“Where else _could_ I be, Mom?” Mieszko smiled down at her, reaching out and with the same incredible gentleness that both her boys always used with her cradled her weak hand in his own. “You know I can’t let Tata do this alone.”

“I know.” Helen said, even as she felt her strength slip away. “I know. Mieszko?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Don’t let him freeze you out, or slip into those dark thoughts of his alone. Don’t let him grieve himself to death. For me?”

“Of course, Mom. I promise. I won’t let him be alone, no matter what it takes.”

“Thank you, Mieszko. You’ve been the best son anyone could ask for, these last ten years. Just like your Tata has been the best husband.”

Mieszko smirked, though it was weak compared to his normal expression.

“I’ll have to take your word for it, Mom. I wouldn’t know much about either of those.”

“Oh, stop it.” Helen laughed, a frail, pale little imitation of her former vibrance. She blinked slowly. “Get your Tata, for me, won’t you?”

Mieszko felt something dark and pained spark in his chest as he saw - nearly felt, given as much death as he’s seen - the weakness washing over her.

“I’ll get him.” He squeezed her hand once, then rose to find John, filled with the knowledge that this might very well be the last time either of them spoke to Helen Wick before she died.

“I love you, Mieszko.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

Much as he usually enjoyed it, just that once Mieczysław Wick would’ve loved to have been wrong, Helen slipping away peacefully in her sleep four hours later.

…

_Stargate Command, Cheyenne Mountain; Three Days Ago_

Booted feet pounded against the metalwork and stone that crossed and crisscrossed the warren of rooms and hallways under NORAD and the epicenter of Stargate Command in Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs.

SGC was a buzzing hive of a mixed-use scientific-military-exploratory complex. Someone was always going _somewhere_ , Stargate teams were coming and going at all hours, and sometimes the base’s commander swore the resident geeks never slept.

Given the rate of coffee consumption in the mess, the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation officer was inclined to agree.

Even so, considering _who_ was running despite there being no claxons sounding the alarm and the mountain hadn’t shaken from some experiment blowing shit up, these _particular_ booted feet heading straight for the meeting between the commanding officer of Cheyenne Mountain, the Chief Science Officer, and the Master Sergeant (as well as the leaders of the base’s tribe in the first two who were a bonded-and-married set) more than a few of the soldiers who caught sight of Dr. M. Rodney McKay running for the Colonel’s office like his ass was on fire - or someone had told him the mess had run out of coffee - there was some _alarm._

With his own bonded guide in Dr. Daniel Jackson, Colonel Jack O’Neill’s best friend and member of his team SG1, two paces ahead of him, the pair tore through the base on the way to Jack’s office.

Not to see Jack, no for once the man with the _oddest_ damn luck that Rodney had ever seen outside of his guide Danny wasn’t the cause of their hurry.

It was the Master Sergeant.

Specifically, one MSgt Noah Mieczyslaw Stilinski - which Rodney _still_ thought that that middle name was a criminal act to bestow on any child after having known the man for years - who had been recruited for the Stargate program at the same time as Jack, and the reason why half the time Danny didn’t get kidnapped or married off to same alien princess on SG1’s trips through the stargate. Rodney owed Noah a _lot,_ not the least was keeping Danny from _dying_ before they could even meet. He was also one of the only people he’d ever met who neither backed down nor got all _offended_ when Rodney went on a tirade.

Even Danny and Jack had gotten pissed off at him a time or two, but Noah was simply unflappable.

But when one considered the man’s frankly horrible past, it was easy to see _how_ he’d cultivated an unshakeable stoicism.

Crazy wife disappearing along with their son, then turning up dead two weeks later while both law enforcement _and_ the Council turned up precisely bupkis on the tyke was more than enough reason to go glacial.

Yeah, if anyone Rodney had ever met had a reason to freeze people out, it was the Master Sergeant who, honestly, was too decorated a soldier to stay in Cheyenne Mountain with their relatively slim number of enlisted soldiers to manage, but the man was also an unmovable object and had refused attempts to move him to anywhere from training baby Marines to the Pentagon since his latest promotion.

And now nineteen years, three months, and six days after his son had gone missing, somehow Noah still had hope that his kid would be found.

Most people in the mountain and SGC chalked that bit up to faith.

Rodney, having actually had a conversation with the man, knew it was more along the lines of a spine made of solid titanium and a stubbornness that managed to make even Sam Carter back down a time or a dozen.

The Master Sergeant trained his Marines and the Airman who ended up under his purview - grizzled veterans of the stargate and bare-faced babies alike - as if every day might be their last, took no shit off of any civilian no matter how highly educated (including Rodney and Danny), and never stopped thinking that he would see his son again even if he _had_ stopped believing that actively searching was going to turn anything up after about a year of the kid being missing if Rodney had the story straight.

Jack arched a brow while Carter gave them a _look_ \- despite Rodney bonding one of her best friends, the Lieutenant Colonel was never going to be one of his fans, finding his personality abrasive _at best_ , mainly because he took issue more than once with her tendency towards shortcuts when it came to alien technology - at the interruption.

Meanwhile, the reason for it just sipped at his coffee cup and eyed the pair with curiosity.

“Where’s the fire?” Jack asked, already half-braced for whatever problem could have _both_ Danny _and_ Rodney making a run for his office.

Only to find himself ignored as Rodney was target-locked on the Marine who’d made it his life’s mission the last few years to keep the death toll at SGC as low as possible on the enlisted front - with quite a bit of success, given who was working on the other end of it trying to ruin his day, like Goa’uld system lords - and blurted out damn-near the _last_ thing that Jack expected.

“There’s been a hit on your son’s DNA profile through the S&G database.” Rodney spilled out in a rushed babble without pausing to take a breath or think about the best way to drop the naquadah-enhanced nuke in his friend’s lap with all the subtly of a fifty-ton ordnance load. “His profile was run at Westchester’s Center, according to the notations on his file, his sample was taken at an ER on the border of NYC’s territory and the ‘burbs in the wee hours of the morning two days ago.”

Noah sucked in a breath, eyes wide, and only keeping from running out of the room through sheer hard-won discipline as he turned to look at Jack.

Neither of them, under the wash of shock, found themselves all that surprised that Rodney and the other resident geeks had made it their business to keep track of Noah’s son’s DNA profile in the S&G system rather than wait for - _when, all of them thought when given Noah’s own faith -_ the Council to alert the man of their own accord.

It was completely in character while also being starkly illegal and supremely in keeping with how cavalier the SGC’s scientists could be with some matters, especially if they decided they liked you.

“He signed out of the ER at 0500 the same day the sample was collected.” Danny supplied the rest. “The name attached to the sample was Lt. Fidel Mieczysław Wick, USMC. His supposed father was in the ER at the same time, they were the victims of a home invasion according to the file and _both_ came online as a result. They agreed to check in at the Center after discharge but never showed up.”

“Anything else?” Jack asked when Noah couldn’t seem to find words. Not that anyone could blame them. “And I’m not even going to _ask_ how the pair of you got access to confidential patient records.”

“Probably wise.” Rodney just shrugged, completely unrepentant. “There was a second police call-out by the county sheriff to the address I found registered in the property database to this _John Wick_ character, but there weren’t any details and when the S&G team swung by to check in on them when neither showed up at the Center as promised no one was home.”

At that, Noah’s eyes hardened and he stared at Jack, who merely nodded and rose to his feet.

“I’ll get approval from Hammond,” the leader of SG1 told him. Not that getting that approval was going to be _easy._ Using SGC resources to track down Noah's son would be a no-brainer if he was on an alien planet. Using them to do the same on their _own_ shiny blue marble in the cosmos was a different thing altogether but in the end he knew he'd get the approval. For a man who's saved the world and trains soldiers to do the same, Hammond and the President alike would be willing to do far more than allow SG1 to takeover a S&G investigation. Which reminded him: he'd have to send Teal'c a message so their Jaffa buddy knew what was up in case he wanted to join in. “Go pack, we’ll find your boy, Noah, even if we have to search every last inch of New York to do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

…

_The Continental, New York Branch, Five Days Ago:_

With his Tata busy getting a drink and talking with Winston down in the bar to get intel on Iosef Tarasov’s movements, Mieczyslaw made his way back to the office behind the front desk to talk to his own member of Management who he had a soft spot for and vice versa.

John might have a companionable relationship with his mentor, but Mieczyslaw had always preferred Charon.

And not _just_ because it had been the enigmatic concierge of The Continental who had first seen and recognized his intelligence for what it was and took steps to see it nurtured - often in ways that had nothing at all to do with their shared profession (whether active or support) and affiliation with the High Table, and everything to do with Mieczyslaw being a child in a lifestyle that wasn’t kind to _anyone_ least of all the young being sculpted into the next generations of assassins and their support.

Nations crumble and regimes fall at the will of the High Table and the patrons of the Continental, but they did so only according to a strict code of conduct that had no leniency and no exceptions.

There were times that Mieczyslaw _hated_ his birth mother for forcing him onto this path.

He imagined a life with a policeman as a father and mentor instead of an assassin.

He thought about having friends his own age instead of sparring partners. Of dancing lessons that were _always_ dance lessons and not unarmed combat or parkour. Of learning how to swing a bat to _play baseball_ or getting all of his degrees in his _own_ name and not in a series of aliases to keep under the radar of the kinds of people who exploited people with minds like his in _situations_ like his.

Presenting as two-natured (or twin-sexed, or intersexed, or a dozen other descriptors for the utter _fuckery_ that was a horrific week one month after he turned sixteen where his body and hormones threw an _epic_ tantrum) had only made being the adopted son of John Wick _more_ complicated not less.

Since joining the Marines he’d gotten that last bit, but even so: those were only two degrees to his name instead of all of them, and not even in the fields he would’ve preferred but ones designed to cast him as a typical - if highly intelligent - soldier.

But Claudia _had_ called in her markers, and the pair of him and his Tata had been living with the consequences ever since.

Charon had always been an emotional rock for a young boy who’d been raised by the assassin equivalent of an iceberg where ninety percent of John’s emotions were hidden under the surface and what _did_ show was rarely warm and fuzzy.

Oh, John loved him, there was never any doubt about that.

But he showed it in relentless training, weapons practice, and nightly hugs in the privacy of their home.

Smiles were rare, but praise and discipline were handed out with an even hand.

Until Helen, who taught them both how to smile and laugh and openly love each other in ways that a hardened assassin and a prodigious pre-teen hadn’t managed to figure out for themselves.

So it was no surprise that while his Tata went to see Winston and talk about what in Sentinel terms was a _hunt,_ and an assassin would call a vendetta, Mieszko went to talk to Charon.

Not about what was coming, but about what came _after_ \- and Mieszko never doubted for a moment that between them there _would_ be an after.

While he’d been latent, Charon had been a placid rock, an oasis of calm in the violent world they all called home.

Now with his Guide abilities online and ramped up to the max because of the last two days, Mieszko _knew_ that while Charon _was_ as calm and unshakeable as he seemed on the surface, underneath was a vein of ice-cold intelligence and a shocking - to anyone but one of their own - capacity for violence.

Mieszko had never liked Winston all that much, though he couldn’t say _why_ until now with his psionic abilities unlocked and telling him that Winston’s personality carried a depth of ambition and self-interest that was repellent to a Guide’s imperatives, but Charon he’d trusted as much as anyone _not_ his Tata in their professional lives and just an iota more than Marcus, his Tata’s old friend and mentor from the Marines.

He trusted him still - at least with the task that Mieszko was going to set before him.

“You and your father are causing _quite_ the ruckus, Mieczysław.” Charon commented as he looked up from pursuing that day’s _London Times_ \- in paper format, not electronic, one of his eccentricities that he enjoyed - in his sedate office behind the front desk. “The prices on both of your heads from Mr. Tarasov are currently tied for the highest being offered for a contract in the world.”

“Oh?” Mieszko gave the Englishman a half-smile. “How much are we each worth to Mr. Tarasov? One million? Two?”

“Two.” Charon confirmed with a bit of a smile for how apt his former student was at knowing how men - their kind of men - thought even before he received his, ah, _upgrades._ “Personally, there’s no professional I am aware of who would risk trying for both of you, no matter the price, but then,” he sighed. “I have been wrong in such matters before.”

“That’s because you don’t have a greedy bone in your entire body, Charon.” Mieszko said wryly. “Your life is one of service to the Continental and the High Table. Avarice has no place in true service.”

“One of many lessons your tenure working for the High Table has taught you.” Charon nodded. “And one that I believe will serve you well in the future.”

“Well, Tata and I have always been a little _off_ from the professional norm around here.” Mieszko shrugged. “What’s one more thing when our careers are over now anyway?”

“And what would you call John’s current path if not a return to former haunts?”

“A hunt.” Mieszko said firmly. “Unsanctioned, true. But a hunt nonetheless.”

Charon titled his head a bit in a cessation of that line of discussion, not a true agreement with Mieszko’s point but recognizing that he had one.

“What do you need from me, Mieszko?” He finally asked. “I imagine John will be handling your armament for his _hunt.”_

“He’s already seen the sommelier, and as always our lockers have been maintained under your charge with the utmost of care.” Mieszko smiled and gave a genuine nod of thanks for that _care_ which had him in a clean set of black urban tactical wear instead of having to borrow one of the slick suits that his Tata preferred. “I have reason to believe that a blood draw was taken while I was unconscious at the hospital. If forwarded to any of the local centers, my birth identity in conjunction with my current legal identity will be known in a matter of days if not hours. I need you to disconnect anything linking John and Fidelis Wick to Baba Yaga and Konetsko. All of it from bank accounts to hidden identities, it all needs to disappear as shortly our background are going to come under _intense_ scrutiny.”

Especially when the matter of John’s _hunt_ comes into play.

Extending his hand, Mieszko rested it on the desk blotter and slid it to the right, revealing the dozen gold coins - the currency of their underworld - spread out in a line before the best information broker Mieszko had ever met.

Charon arched his brows in surprise at the payment that was four times what would normally be billed to a member of the Continental for such an in-depth background scrub.

One had _already_ been performed a decade before on John when he left their life to marry a teacher.

In his case, what Mieszko was requesting was simply insurance that _that_ work still held.

Another had been done on Mieszko when he went into the military but not as pristine as what he wanted now.

By the time Charon and his contacts were done, there wouldn’t be so much as a digital strand of hair connecting the pair of assassins to the Wicks.

Given Mieszko’s new and fully functional abilities, Charon thought that that was rather the point.

“The Continental is always glad to be of service.” Charon agreed, then called out as Mieszko turned to leave: “Happy hunting, little one. You will be missed.”

_..._

_Wick Residence, Four Days Ago_

SG1 plus one Dr. M. Rodney McKay pulled up to a beautiful modern home that showed clear signs of recent trouble in a pair of matching black armored SUVs.

Normally, Rodney wasn’t a fan of field work for all that he was rated for it and could even be called an old hand at it, unless it directly involved a new cache of Ancient technology that he could explore.

In this case, he’d been the first to insist that he come along because as much as he appreciated the minds of both his sentinel and Carter, neither one of them was nearly the practiced hacker that Rodney was and no one knew what they were going to find at the Wick house or if any of it was going to need someone finessing it on site instead of remotely.

Given the suspicious gaps in the background of both John and Fidelis Wick, Rodney was relatively certain that his skills were going to be needed at _some_ point on this endeavor to reunite Noah with his spawn, even if he couldn’t predict when.

That Noah was his friend was entirely immaterial to his insistence on his inclusion - and that was his story and he was sticking to it before anyone got any dreadful ideas about him going _soft_ or worse _teasing him_ over his decision.

The trio of sentinels all listed closely for a moment, spreading their senses out over the house and the surrounding area, then Jack in the first SUV called it over their communicators:

“Clear.”

As one, SG1 and Rodney exited their vehicles and approached the home, Danny and Sam sharing one of those little _hmms_ that both guides often did when they were sensing something on the psionic plane or from their psionic-fueled extrasensory feedback that most sentinels might as well be deaf and blind to.

Unless they were Alpha Primes, but Rodney was _more_ than satisfied with having less range or sensitivity on his abilities in exchange for _not_ having empathy lojacked into his head or any of the other “fun” perks that Alpha Primes got to deal with on top of supercharged instincts and imperatives.

No _thank you_.

His zeta ass was perfectly happy with his enhanced sight and sound - rated just under O’Neill on both, and the man was widely considered the Alpha Prime _of Earth_ \- with some increase to his reflexes and hand-eye coordination that helped significantly with applied engineering.

Which since Alpha Primes tended to be found - almost strictly, with a bit of a deviation in the statistics for law enforcement - in the military to go with the squishy psionic issues _and_ Rodney used to shake whenever Danny or Noah handed him a gun while he was in the early processes of getting field-rated for the stargate teams, for once Rodney was happy as a clam at not being the absolute _best_ at something.

He was still one of the highest-rated zeta sentinels, so in that way his ego was appeased.

“Well, whoever John Wick is,” Rodney murmured sentinel quiet even as Jack moved forward and tried the door only to find it unlocked.

Which given that there were boards over more than one window and what looked like bullet holes in the hallway once Jack and Noah cleared it, wasn’t that surprising.

“Your boy wasn’t raised in poverty, that’s for sure.” He finished his thought, which got him a bit of a _look_ from Sam - as if she and they as a group weren’t all thinking the exact same thing.

Jack and Noah - both five-sense-enhanced Alphas - were taking the strange deep breaths through their noses and then almost panting breaths through their mouths (similar to a cat) smelling and tasting the air.

When no alarms sounded or boobytraps were sprung or whatever the worst-case scenario Jack was running through mentally occurred, the three military members holstered their weapons even as the group as a whole started spreading out through the house.

There wasn’t much in way of personal decoration, was the first thing that struck Rodney underneath all of the evidence of the attacks - more than one, that much he got from the information Jack and Noah were picking up - but what little there was seemed to show a happy family of three.

Though something about both father and son had the hackles on the back of his neck wanting to lift in primitive warning when he caught sight of what he thought might be the most recent picture of the family: proud parents and son at Noah-Jr.’s officer graduation.

“Noah,” Rodney called for the man, knowing he’d want to see the pictures on the walls in what he was pegging as Wick-Sr.’s study or office, already moving to hook his laptop up to the computer on the desk. “There’s some pictures down here I think you want to see.”

“Yeah.” Noah said lowly, voice gruff from the upstairs. “Be there soon.”

Considering in his friend’s place Rodney - theoretically, since he’d never really felt the need for spawning more McKay’s and inflicting them on the world - would have tracked down his missing son’s bedroom and the other man was upstairs, Rodney didn’t comment on the tone or the tears it held.

Nope.

Not his department, that was Danny’s half of maintaining their friendships with other human beings.

That was the deal.

Instead, Rodney put his head down into his keyboard and set to unearthing every last secret that might be hiding on the computers - hello there, entire network - in the house.

If he paid special attention to anything that might contained jpeg or mpeg or any other kind of media files and ensured they were separated out for Noah, that was his own affair.

…

For a long moment, Danny thought he and Sam were going to have to go and coax Noah out of a zone-out when he went unresponsive for several long minutes, only to find the sentinel joining him on the upstairs landing with a small stack of picture frames in his hands.

Hands that were white-knuckled around the wooden edges of the frames, the Marine’s mouth taking on that pinched look it always got right before Noah ripped into one of his enlisted service members for whatever fresh bit of stupidity they decided to almost kill themselves and others with.

Working with him at SGC, Danny had seen that look more often than he’d rather, though much _less_ often over the last few years since Noah took over training than in the beginning of the gate teams and their explorations.

For his part, Danny had a thick photo album he’d found in the master bedroom before Jack had called the pair of them back downstairs in a tone that Danny read as _highly irritated_ over whatever the Colonel had found on the ground floor, all of them, even Rodney, reconvening in the kitchen though his sentinel’s laptop was nowhere to be found.

Likely hooked up to the Wicks’ system and mining it for information if he had to guess.

Though what Jack and Sam had found that had the pair of them looking like someone had pissed in their cereal Danny couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“What’ve you got there, Noah?” Sam asked, as Jack visibly fumed and tried to wrangle his temper, only to blink in shock as Noah laid out the photo frames in a particular order.

“Well, well.” Rodney stated, brows lifted in surprise even as his expression turned calculating, a bit of the puzzle of mini-Stilinski’s disappearance slotting into place. “That’s interesting.”

Interesting wasn’t even the half of it, Danny thought, as he saw in black-and-white (literally) how Mieczyslaw Stilinski had come into the care of John Wick.

There were four framed portraits in total: one of a young woman with her hair pulled sharply back into a tight bun in toe shoes and tutu, all creamy skin speckled with beauty marks. Another of the same woman only younger - Danny would say early teens - smiling at the camera with her arms wrapped around the shoulders of a younger child, a boy Danny would put about eleven or twelve. The third portrait showed the same pair, only the girl was now a woman in a pretty sundress with an arm linked through that of an older boy-turned-man in a Marine’s dress uniform. And the last: a new boy, only handful of years old if that, with the same mole-speckled skin as the girl riding on the shoulders of the man who’d gone from solemn to stern from the second portrait to the last.

“Alright,” Jack blinked, visibly shaking a thought off. “There’s no doubt that mini-Stilinski is yours. So the question becomes: how did your wife know John Wick and why didn’t it show up on the background check the police and the Council did when she went missing with your son?”

“Because I found out _after_ she kidnapped our son,” Noah said heavily, fists clenched. “That her identity was only ten years old. I don’t even know if Claudia was her real name. No tree we shook managed to track who she was before she became Claudia Gajos.”

“Except,” Sam pointed out, though not without compassion for Noah’s situation and ongoing grief, the Lt. Col. picking up the frames and undoing the backing to see if there were any notes written on the back as some people did for record keeping. “That apparently she’d known Mr. Wick and for whatever reason gave your son to him.”

He didn’t want to do it, but Danny had to ask the question, especially since both Jack and Rodney were giving him “if you don’t, I will” looks.

“What’s the likelihood that she was convinced - because of her illness or otherwise - that John Wick was Mieczyslaw’s father?”

“Non-existent.” Noah grimaced, one hand unclenching to rub over his mouth. “Her delusions were focused on our - mine and Mischief’s - latency and fears for her and all our lives. That someone would take us away or that we’d kill her. I never could figure out _why_ they went that way, and then she took him, so…” He shrugged. That had been that, though god knows he’d tortured himself over it often enough.

“Hmm,” Sam hummed, then passed Danny the last photograph back-up, the one of Claudia and her friend when they were kids, the only one that had writing on it. Or properly: Claudia and _Jandani._

And Danny immediately understood why, pursing his lips and passing it to Rodney who scowled.

“That’s an Eastern European name, isn’t it?” She asked, cutting to the heart of the matter when Danny nodded.

“Romani.” He answered, feeling sick to his stomach. “Which might explain why her delusions focused as they did. If both of them escaped the purges and the abductions…”

Jack just let out a soft curse.

It wasn’t exactly an _open_ secret, but he’d been in the military and an online Sentinel enough time to know about _that_ round of horrors that had cropped up after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“And generally speaking, anyone interested in smuggling Romani and latent kids out of Eastern Europe back in the day weren’t necessarily doing it for _wholesome_ purposes.” Rodney wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Explains the encryptions on the computer and the network, not enough to keep me out, but definitely more than I’d expect a former-Marine and a teacher to have.”

“People have died here, at least a dozen, in the last day. Add the case with foam inserts in the garage,” they all got an explanation for what had aggravated Jack. “Enough for a miniature arsenal plus ammunition. Looks like it was buried under the concrete floor and then torn up in the last couple days, and whatever’s going on it’s not looking good for Wick and Mini-Stilinski.”

“Empty hidden cache in Mischief’s bedroom.” Noah supplied when they all looked at him. “And cases for what I’d peg as a sniper rifle and a pair of pistols.”

“Mercenaries?” Sam floated the idea only to get shrugged at.

Without actually meeting either of them or seeing what they were up to, it was impossible to say.

“Fun fact.” Rodney chimed in after retrieving his laptop. “There’s a registration for a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429, painted silver with black rally stripes attached to Wick _but_ despite the home invasion and no sign of the car, it hasn’t been reported stolen.” He glanced at the others. “If we can track that car, I have a feeling we’ll find them.” He thought a moment and then added: “If they don’t do something epically stupid like end up in cuffs or use their credit cards.”

Maybe it was just Rodney being Rodney, but at the moment Danny _really_ hoped that they caught a sudden bout of stupidity.

Because with the kind of armament that Jack, Sam, and Noah were discussing, otherwise things were about to get _very_ bloody, extremely quickly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shamansal - plural form of Shaman as specifically applies to Guides and/or the Guide Classification.
> 
> And some military slang for those who are unfamiliar:
> 
> FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Recovery (or Repair, or Recognition, depending on the person's preference.)  
> SNAFU - Situation Normal All Fucked Up
> 
> And an SG1 tidbit: "Murray" aka Teal'c of Chulak, Murray being his earth-side alias when not in Cheyenne Mountain or around those in the know regarding the Stargate program.

**Parabellum**

**Chapter Two: Hide and Seek**

_The Psionic Plane; Elsewhen_

Dr. Blair Sandburg, PhD, ruling Shaman Guide over North America, felt the empathic shockwave two seconds before he blinked and opened his eyes on the psionic plane.

_Someone_ had just onlined, traumatically, and were of _significant_ power.

Given that as a Shaman, the only other Guides capable of throwing or pulling him onto the psionic plane _was_ another shaman, that whoever just came online was powerful wasn’t in question, even if Blair hadn’t been caught up in the tailend of an empathic shockwave that likely hit most of the Eastern Seaboard though he wouldn’t know for certain until his consciousness returned to the physical plane.

Or, if the shockwave didn’t knock his sentinel and husband on his ass, he could wait a couple minutes for Jim, as the Alpha Prime Sentinel of North America, to gather information and take care of a few things on the physical plane before pulling him in to join him.

That Jim _would_ be joining him or there would be hell to pay on the marital front was without question, even if Jim wasn’t his partner and bondmate in leading the Sentinel and Guide Council for North America and playing both leaders and counselors for their people.

For their Pride.

Blair knew that it had to have hit most of the East Coast for a simple reason: by the time it hit _him_ in Washington D.C. where he and Jim were having meetings regarding S&G policy and legislation with everyone from the President on down, it wasn’t anywhere near full strength.

An empathic shockwave was like an electromagnetic pulse or the force generated by a bomb blast: it got weaker the farther it spread from impact or point of origin.

The one that hit Blair while intense, only hit him as hard as it did _because_ of who he was and the psionic sensitivity that went hand-in-hand with being either shaman or zeta class guides who by virtue of the path and emphases their gifts took were far more sensitive or in sync with the psionic plane than any other kinds of guides or an alpha prime sentinel.

Well, unless there was an unknown Primal Guide running around, but that was the sort of thing that was like the Queen of England riding a pink elephant through Piccadilly: people _would_ notice.

Blair took stock of the plane surrounding him with its normal - if odd compared to the physical plane - coloring that was predominately shades of saturated blue with highlights and shadows of other colors here and there. There was no sense of dread or foreboding, and the plane didn’t seem distressed. Which was all to the good.

Though the longer he sat there and focused, the greeted the sense of _waiting and finally and expectation_ that surrounded him and - call him paranoid or having flashbacks to his own early years as a Guide - didn’t exactly fill him with warm fuzzies.

Eventually, Blair knowing Jim’s habits would say less than five minutes later in the physical plane, he felt a bit of a tugging sensation on his bond with his sentinel, and then it was the work of seconds to pull him in.

As soon as his mate joined him - still as tall and strong as ever despite having celebrated his fiftieth birthday the last go ‘round - their spirit animals darted out of the blue haze of the forest to the left hand side of this part of the psionic plane. It was a part that Blair could honestly say he’d never seen the like of before: all rolling meadow with flowers that looked like the psionic plane equivalent of every kind of daisy one could think of, with a dense forest to the left and a shadow ahead. The shadow could be everything from more forest to a mountain, but Blair couldn’t deny that he was getting the impression from the psionic plane that _that_ was where they were needed.

Jim ran steel-colored eyes over Blair, ensuring that his guide was unharmed, followed by a hand over his messy brown curls that had yet to be touched by the grey that was speckling Jim’s own short black hair and had already turned his temples white.

Blair’s spirit animal - in many ways the other half of himself, and that many guides debated were the other halves of their _souls_ \- Elliot scampered up Blair’s leg to curl a tiny hand into his hair and rest on his shoulder, the clever-eyed capuchin monkey throwing a heckle at Jabar, Jim’s jaguar, that had chased him from the tree line to meet their people.

The sentinel and guide shared an amused look over the antics, Jim patting one of Jabar’s strong shoulders, then filled Blair in on what little he’d had time to learn after his other half, well, _fainted_ as much as they both hated it.

At least they’d been getting ready for bed after a long day and night of meetings and not in the middle of a sit-down with the President or one of the Joint Chiefs, because _that_ would have been embarrassing for even Blair’s laid-back personality to swallow.

“New York.” Jim told him, with a grimace at the potential clusterfuck that having a powerful guide onlining anywhere _near_ a major metropolitan area was. The New York centers - with the population in the city they had to have a main Center in Manhatten and then at least one branch center in every borough - were going to be _slammed_ along with emergency services depending on how intense the empathic event was near the epicenter. “Westchester, the Bronx, and Stamford across the stateline in Connecticut were the hardest hit on first reports. But from the calls and updates I got before joining you, we’re talking an event circumference of around three hundred miles reporting everything from mild effects and a vague sense of enhanced unease, to even the most psionically numb mundanes within the first fifty miles sure that they’re in danger of imminent attack.”

As to psionically ungifted and/or untrained, an empathic shockwave often felt like a panic or anxiety attack that wasn’t a surprise - but the distance _was_ as it meant the Blair hadn’t even been hit by the tail-end of it as he’d expected and ruled out almost all of his theories about who the onlining guide might be.

Because as far as he was aware - and you better believe: as the Shaman for North America he _was aware_ of plenty - he didn’t _have_ a latent guide in his territory that strong.

There was one potential that Incacha was watching from Brazil he’d taken under his wing and moved to Peru, and another that was under Master Saito in Japan, but that was _it._

Guessing the strength of either sentinels or guides before they came online was often a crapshoot, but when it came to potential shamans, well, the psionic link was already there - the latent guide just couldn’t consciously activate it yet.

Which made Blair in turns excited, shocked, and _wary_ of this new guide.

Because if they could _hide_ from the handful of Shamans that made up the guide half of the International Sentinel and Guide Council, that fact - along with the strength of their talents - had _implications_ that Blair was _not_ excited about since those implications were also mired in the biggest devil on _any_ plane: politics.

Strong enough to keep themselves a secret from the _strongest guides in the world_ while their gifts had yet to come fully online and active?

Well, Blair couldn’t think of a time in recorded history where Earth had _had_ a leading Guide, though they _did_ have an Alpha Prime for reasons mired in top-secret clearances and even _more_ politics for all that the general public were absolutely ignorant of that fact.

And _that_ Alpha Prime also already had a bonded Guide, though one who wasn’t close to their same strength in their gifts as their Sentinel was, which was just the cherry on top of the complicated as fuck sundae that this new guide presented.

And Blair didn’t even know their name for goodness sake!

All of which Jim summed up with a dry glance at the agitated form of Elliot and a sarconic: _“Yup.”_

“Let’s go see what we’re dealing with then.” Blair blew out a breath, even as he held out his hand and tangled his fingers - mental or not - with Jim’s and Jabar set out at an easy lope for the shadow in the distance. “And hope they’re not a kid.”

Blair didn’t _think_ that they were, there was something about the whole scenario that he was reading from the _psionic_ plane was far more intentional than anything even the most guileful and wily child - or even a teenager - would be able to manage but he wasn’t willing to discount it.

Sentinels and guides tended to be on the upper curve of intelligence and often showed a tendency to excel in their endeavors, something about the genes needed for latency and activation working along with those of intelligence, strength, and physical health, but Blair had seen too much bullshit over the last two decades as a shaman to discount the fact that intelligence didn’t always equate to wisdom or common sense.

Not all geniuses or prodigies - in whatever field - _were_ sentinels or guides, but enough of them _were_ that there was some really interesting correlational data to look through even if geneticists were still trying to pinpoint the exact vectors that led to activation.

Scientists always made _faces_ when Blair and the rest of his class of guides pointed to the psionic plane and other non-quantifiable traits to being behind it.

Honestly, it was one of the more entertaining parts of being who he was: getting to be - as Jim would call it - all _hippy-dippy_ to hardened scientists and watching their faces curdle because as a shaman they couldn’t even _say_ anything about it, let alone prove him wrong.

The pair walked in companionable silence, both preparing in their own way for whoever they might find on the other end of their little jaunt, but before long it wasn’t alone or with only their spirit animals as the closer they came, the more shamans - with or without their respective sentinels - and their own spirit animals.

Incacha for Central and South America and Master Saito for Asia joined them first with their anaconda and fox spirit animals, both older men with plenty of grey in their hair, then came the Alpha Prime and Shaman of Europe and Russia, and then last followed the Alpha Prime and Shaman over Africa.

No sooner had the last slid into place next to Incacha than they came upon the shadow itself: a massive hedge maze, towering far above them, and seeming to repel any attempt to breach it, including Shaman Alexandra’s attempt to send her alpine swift, Alexei, over the top to spy out the make of the maze.

There was only one opening that any of them could see, and the construction - almost assuredly belonging to their new guide - spread so far to the sides that Blair couldn’t see a way around it.

A metal plaque hung over the single entrance, and while it didn’t fill him with _joy_ he could appreciate the symbolism nonetheless.

“What does it say?” Incacha asked, as of them all it seemed only his young - relatively - proteges had any ideas.

“ _Fortis Fortuna Aduivat,”_ Blair supplied, then translate: “Fortune favors the bold.”

“Or the brave,” Jim added as there was a bit of a debate on that point when it comes to translating Latin, shrugging when it got him a couple _looks._ “Kid is either overeducated, military, or has a military parent.”

“How do you know?” Saito asked in his heavily accented English.

“Because it’s _Latin_.” Jim arched a brow. “And I can think of three different military battalions or companies off the top of my head that use it or a version of it for their motto.”

“Only one way to find out.” Blair reminded him, then stepped forward with Jim hurrying to take point to much amusement on the part of the Guides.

Alpha Prime or not, the psionic plane was _their_ territory, not his or any sentinels.

Still, it was _cute_ that he and the other Alpha Primes always tried to protect them here anyway, even if it was their spirit animals that were likely to be _far_ more effective than themselves.

It was the thought that counted.

Jim let out a whistle as Jabar led their group of trouble-magnets (no matter his arguments to the contrary from Blair, Jim had it on good authority that _all_ shaman level/class guides were _drawn_ to trouble and vice versa, some of the stories from Saito’s mate and sentinel Akira gave him _chills_ ) into the center of the blue hedge maze that Alexandra said was some kind of flowering quince.

Whatever, plants weren’t his deal, all he cared about was that they had _wicked_ looking spines that all of the spirit animals kept well away from, with the rest of them following their example.

He wished that Blair was a bit more cautious about this place, especially as in the psionic plane - or the shaman playground, depending on how frustrated he and Blair were with each other on any given day - a sentinel’s physical enhancements were stripped away and there _was_ nothing to scent or taste or feel.

Not really.

Anything that _did_ occur to them there was, quite literally, all in their heads.

It was _possible_ to die in the physical world from wounds or accidents or trauma in the psionic plane, but it was really fucking rare unless it was an intentional attack.

And generally speaking, any guide with enough power and control to access the psionic plane in such a way would end up having their powers nullified by a shaman long before they got to that point, if their own powers didn’t turn on them and render them _forcibly_ dormant as penance.

Don’t get him wrong: it was possible for someone to go naturally dormant or never emerge at all. It happened. Hell, it happened not all that long ago to a high-level General in the Marines after his wife died.

But for all that they’d never admit it to a mundane or worse - the mundane government - the psionic plane and how they were linked to it had a _lot_ more sway over shamans and even to an extent Alpha Primes than anyone would ever be allowed to know outside of their small personal tribe.

It would be political napalm if anyone ever found out, and Jim considered it one of his duties as an Alpha Prime - and part of his imperative to protect both his guide and his pride - to ensure that _that_ particular little tidbit of Sentinel/Guide culture never saw the light of day.

The same as Alpha Primes had been doing for literal centuries.

Now if only he could keep his guide from circling the damn statue that his instincts were reasonably certain was the reason they’d gone on this little forced field trip like it - or maybe he - was the last piece of cake in the entire world, that’d be swell.

“Whatcha doin’ with the weirdass statue, Chief?” Jim drawled, crossing his arms and planting his feet in the very _picture_ of unimpressed.

Though even he’d admit that the statue - maybe, _please just be a statue_ \- was impressive.

It crouched on a plinth of dark stone, in the traditional runner’s _ready_ position for a sprint, fingertips touching the stone and legs braced for take off. Based on the length of said-legs, Jim estimated that the runner was at least six feet tall. And definitely a male, albeit a bit on the pretty side.

“I have seen such things before.” Incacha murmured, held tilted in interest, then waved to Jim. “Before you awoke and were found by my people. The spirit realm’s impression of a powerful being about to emerge.”

“Perhaps the truest look at our new brother we will ever see.” Saito added, gaze equally as rapt as the rest of the shamansal.

“Except he’s already emerged.” Jim pointed out the flaw in that thinking. “Unless we’ve got a twofer on powerful guides causing shockwaves in one day.”

Blair made a half-groaning noise of dismay at his sentinel.

Ask him about sentinel traditions or military maneuvers or police procedure and Jim would rattle off facts and statistics so fast Blair’s head spun.

Ask him to listen and _remember_ anything that he considered verging on the line of “voodoo” or “hippy dippy” and he’d just check out, glazed eyes and all.

Which was probably his most _infuriating_ trait, especially since he could do so much _more_ with his skills if he bothered to learn more about psionic abilities and apply them to himself beyond working with Jabar.

“Time isn’t static in the psionic plane.” Blair reminded his sentinel for the umpteenth time. “That’s how zeta guides and shaman can predict and prevent events before they happen.”

Which wasn’t precognition, for all that it read like it on paper.

It was more like a really _really_ effective form of instinct that if a guide learned to listen to it, it would push them and lead them in the correct direction for the best outcome depending on the guide’s goals and imperatives.

So while the new guide in questions was still static in the psionic plane, he was _also_ online in the physical realm.

Frankly, Blair had found over the years, when it came to the psionic plane, very little about it had to do or dealt in absolutes with the exception of cutting off a guide’s access to it - _that_ was always final, and given some guides who stay latent all their lives, had some interesting implications regarding what latency _truly_ was.

“Are we _sure_ this guy is a guide?” Jim asked next, taking in the fierce expression on the male’s face, almost a snarl, along with what he was seeing as a _lot_ of weapons.

If _this_ was the guy’s truest self, then Jim was kinda worried. Ya know. Given the sword sheathed on his back. The sniper rifle that criss-crossed it. The pistols holstered on his thighs.

“I _know_ he is.” Blair said with certainty, the other shamansal backing him up either with nods or words of agreement. Then he frowned, leaning in to look at a piece of the guide’s outfit that caught his eye more than anything else. Because it was golden, and circling his neck. “I…” Blair stood up and looked back at the rest. “I think he’s Primal.” He finally said, shocked down to his toes. “That’s why all the…” He waved in the direction of the weaponry. “And if so: he’s the closest thing guides have to a warrior class.” Then he looked specifically at Master Saito who was both the eldest of them _and_ the most deeply educated when it came to guide-specific history. Even the things that they kept from their own people to protect those of the most profound gifts. “There hasn’t been a Primal that’s emerged in…?”

“The last - _factual_ and confirmed - record we have of a Primal Guide dates to more than two hundred years ago in Africa.” Saito provided instantly. “He arose to lead his people to safety from European colonization and enslavement. But, well,” he tilted his head in a _we all know what happened with that_ kind of motion. “His people survived to tell the tale, and given the area he was born in, it would be a decent extrapolation to say that they _wouldn’t_ have if he hadn’t led them inland and protected them from Europeans and other tribes alike.”

“Given their traits.” Alexandra added. “It would be safe to say that most Primal Guides before genetic testing were mislabeled or misidentified by their people as Alpha Primes or whatever the cultural equivalent would have been.”

“Ah, not to piss you off Chief.” Jim asked the dumb question, never afraid to do so even when it got him one of those exasperated little _looks_ in return. “But what’s the difference?”

“Did you have an imperative driving you before you even came online to take certain steps or learn certain skills?” Blair asked, arching his brows. “Did you surround yourself instinctively with sentinels and guides? Because I can almost guarantee without even talking to him that he,” Blair waved at the not-a-statue. “Did. Especially with the torc around his neck.”

“Huh?”

“The golden necklace.” Blair pointed out the only bit of not-blue color on the not-a-statue. “Every reference left behind by past shamansal who _have_ come in contact with a Primal are certain on two measures: they have a golden rank signifier in the psionic plane _and_ they only awaken due to a high-level threat. The sort of thing that requires a unified, undisputed leader that even the most pigheaded Alpha Prime or up-themself sentinel or guide will instinctively defer to. I don’t know who he is - _yet_ \- but whatever is coming, the psionic plane has decided it’s going to be his problem to deal with it.”

Which, considering what the entire S&G Council knew - but at the same time kept a clear hands-off policy regarding actually _knowing_ \- about some of the things that were kept secret from the general public was actually kind of terrifying.

Because _what the actual fuck_ could be so bad that it required the Alpha Prime of _Earth_ to let someone else take the lead on?

Considering his day job with the military, and that it was Colonel Jack O’Neill they were talking about, _what the actual fuck man?_

Given the expressions on the others’ faces, all of them varying levels of in the know but _not_ at the same time that all of the Council maintained, it was a sentiment they all shared.

And then they were all startled out of _horrifying implications_ spirals by the not-a-statue taking a deep breath that was audible even in the psionic plane, and opening golden brown eyes that were _piercing_ for a mental avatar that had been frozen solid almost a minute before.

An avatar that took everything around him in a single swift glace as he stood, and then summed up all of their thoughts with a pithy:

_“Well, fuck.”_

_..._

_New York Sentinel and Guide Center, Brooklyn Branch; Two Days Ago_

“So, those’re our troublemakers, huh?” Jim Ellison, Alpha Prime of North America commented as he came around the corner of the Center.

Colonel Jack O’Neill unofficial (as far as the public was concerned) Alpha Prime of Earth held in the urge to let rip with a truly _impressive_ round of cussing at the sight of him along with someone even _Jack_ hesitated to piss off: Ellison’s Guide and contender for the title of most powerful Guide/Shaman on the planet: Dr. Blair Sandburg.

Anyone worth their salt knew that pissing off guides was a dangerous pastime, given that they’d close ranks and make someone miserable faster than Jack could say _Stargate._ Yeah, guides might _feel_ like candy or a warm hug or sex on a stick (depending, among plenty of other descriptions) to sentinels, but they could be _vicious_ when it came to defending their own. And the higher up the chain of guide hierarchy someone got, the father their reach extended to make anyone who pissed them off - or even mildly annoyed them - pay.

Granted: it wouldn’t be anything _truly_ harmful. That kinda thing went against their instincts for the most part along with the guide imperatives. But guides were often the _worst_ sorts of subversive little bastard when riled and Jack had no intention of having, say, his... his requisite naked-baby pictures splattered all over the SGC servers or have the mess hall suddenly and inexplicably run out of coffee or pie whenever he wandered through.

“Alpha Prime,” Jack nodded to Ellison then Sandburg. “Dr. Sandburg. Yep, these are them.”

Jim studied the pair that Jack had been watching through the two-way glass into the isolation suite/containment room. Technically, only the sentinel _needed_ to be in there, to keep him from using his enhanced senses against the Center _and_ to keep him from zoning out until they got his instincts dialed down but he’d already heard chapter and verse from the Center’s security staff about the near-feral drive trying to seperate the two had kicked the sentinel - and elder of the pair by quite a large margin - into. They weren’t mates, that much was clear.

But as the DNA tests had _also_ made clear, they weren’t blood related either which made the pair a bit of an anomaly on top of all the _other_ bullshit surrounding them.

Sentinels _didn’t_ ground on non-family members unless they were mates. They just didn’t. A powerful enough guide _could_ buffer them, but generally speaking the sort of absolute control that the sentinel was displaying without a bonded guide was unheard of.

But, then, this kid was _that kid_ that had the shamansal all in a tizzy, so Jim was willing to make a bet that it had something to do with _that_ along with the sentinel _considering_ the kid _his_ kid despite there being no blood relation.

Instincts could be a bitch that way, making fun of the “rules” that scientists and theorists tried to set down about their kind all damn day.

Jim usually found it entertaining as _all hell_ when one of the S&G council scientists were confronted with a situation that defied their precious rules, but in as this pair’s onlining had been a clusterfuck from start to finish - and not _entirely_ all because of the pair’s actions either - he wasn’t quite in the mood to find any humor in the situation.

Blair studied the pair for a long moment, cocking his head to the side and getting that _concentrated_ feeling through the bond that Jim knew meant he was reaching out with his gifts for a remote scan of their newest problem children.

Even if one of them was staring down fifty in a couple years, old enough that he was in the less than one percentile for late emergence even if he wasn’t quite the oldest on record, he’d made a mess and until it was cleaned up and handled Jim wasn’t inclined to think of either of them as more than _baby guide/sentinel_.

Instincts were a bitch: it deserved to be restated.

That said - most sentinel’s instincts didn’t have them cutting a swathe through the _Russian Mob_ within the first couple days of being online either, and no one the Council had reached out to had yet to return with a satisfactory answer for _why_ John Wick had suddenly and abruptly gone feral after spending the last decade being an early retiree: raising his son, loving his wife, and working on his car.

Of course, there seemed to be a _lot_ they didn’t know about John Wick, which did nothing but aggravating the _ever loving shit_ out of everyone on deck to try and deal with this entire FUBAR of a situation.

“What do we know about them?” Jim asked while Blair was doing his squishy shaman thing. Maybe the top Alpha Prime they _had_ had managed to pry some information out of someone, somewhere, about a sentinel and soldier who seemed more myth than than flesh-and-blood man from how little documentation there was on him.

“Well,” Jack idly scratched at his jaw with the nails of one hand. “My team spent the last couple of days tracking them from Westchester to Little Russia to Manhattan and back. Even recalled my buddy Murray from visiting his friends to help out. There’s a missing car and a dead puppy,” which _really_ burned Jack’s ass even if he wasn’t the most animal-friendly person on the planet. “That we _think_ led to the whole near-feral hunt for the sentinel when combined with the home invasion and hospital visit. Why the kid went along with it,” he shrugged. It was his dad - or the only dad he likely remembered. And the pair of them were loyal to each other in a way that Jack had _never_ seen before, on any planet. Figuring out that part wasn’t rocket science and the look on Ellison’s face made it clear that he had that bit figured out for himself. “So now we have a hunt that the Council is going to need to retroactively approve against the Tarasovs, not that there’s a whole lot of them _left_ , with the only bright side being both the mob and those two,” he jerked his chin towards the glass. “Were _very_ careful about collateral damage. Only potential pressure point is a club that Senior there stormed while his kid provided cover fire outside, but no one got a decent shot of him on their phones that’s turned up and - surprise, surprise - the club wasn’t wired for outside storage of their security tapes which have _mysteriously,” cough, McKay, cough, “_ disappeared.”

“He is the one, Jim.” Blair confirmed what they’d suspected as soon as they got close enough to the Center to start getting a reading on the pair. “The missing Stilinski kid.”

“Yeah, he is.” Jack drawled, blinking slowly. “How’d you guess?”

Since as far as Jack was aware, there wasn’t an accurate composite of what the missing kid would look like as an adult that even came _close_ to the guide on the other side of the glass and the Center files that he had access to - which was all of them - didn’t have a current or updated photo attached to the file yet.

DNA or not, putting the DNA profile together against the kid in the other room was still a bit of a leap.

“We’ve met.” Blair said drily. “His emergence pulled all of the online shamansal onto the psionic plane. He wasn’t exactly _happy_ that he’d been outed and onlined all at once.”

Jack took that right on the chin like a champ, as it complicated his plans for the pair _significantly_ as a guide as powerful as the kid would _have_ to be to manage that on the ruling guides wasn’t the sort of power that the SGC was built to mentor and manage.

Which meant joint custody with the Alpha Prime pair.

“Well, fuck.”

Blair and Jim snorted in unison at the Alpha Prime’s unconscious echo of Stiles’s _own_ response to his new circumstances.

“That’s pretty much the response of everyone currently in the know, yeah.” Jim told his, well from a sentinel standpoint, his _Alpha_ for all that he enjoyed rattling Jack’s professional chain whenever possible to keep up the fiction that the other Alpha Prime was just in charge of a low-profile telemetry program stationed at NORAD. But that same low-profile also offered a possible solution if Blair and Jack could avoid butting heads for once. Needless to say: Blair’s more _liberal_ views often came to loggerheads with the mindset of a career military man like Jack O’Neill. “Honestly, Colonel, I think stashing him at Cheyenne Mountain and signing him up for guide lessons with Drs. Jackson and Carter plus Blair when we can muscle it into the schedule is the best solution we have short of sticking him on a plane for South America and dumping him in Incacha’s lap.”

It went unsaid that with his power and connection to the psionic plane, some of his guide education could be handled there but there were still come things that had to be taught in person.

And Blair wouldn't know how to teaching being a _military_ guide even if someone handed him a step-by-step instruction manual, like many people who served guides and sentinels in the military had rituals and methods and a culture all their own.

“He’s a marine, raised by a marine, _born_ from a marine.” Blair said, which wasn’t exactly a stamp of approval - he was actually in favor of having Stiles take a sabbatical in the Peruvian rainforest with the Chopek rather than keeping him locked into the militaristic mindset he’d _clearly_ adopted if his truest mental _self_ had him armed to the teeth and him assisting his father’s hunt against the mob were any sign. “But if you _do_ decide to take him to your operation in Colorado, you’re going to have to take his personal tribe with him unless you want _him_ to go feral next time instead of his dad.”

“His _father_ ,” Jack emphasized the relationship between Noah and the kid. “Is already attached to my command.”

Blair instantly shook his head, waving one hand insistently.

“Nope, you can’t do that, not with him. I met Mr. Stilinski when he came online during the original nightmare of Stiles’s abduction. I know he’s a good man and sentinel who loved his son to pieces but _this,”_ he pointed at the glass and the pair beyond. “Is _not_ that same person for all that the DNA matches. Stiles is a product of his life and experiences far more than any genetics, and that _has_ to be acknowledged. Trying to separate him from his _dad_ , who he clearly loves and is _insanely_ loyal towards, would only be shooting yourself and anyone else involved in the head as far as forming bonds and relationships with him. To that point, given the skills they’ve _clearly_ exhibited, you’d have to lock him up in a secured cell rated for both an Alpha Prime _and_ a Shaman to keep Stiles from disappearing without a trace and then tracking down his tribe and taking them with him, whoever they are. His dad and whoever else he asks for needs to be brought with him to your super-secret military project that the Council - of course - knows _nothing_ about. Officially.” 

Jim and Jack both suddenly found the ceiling _quite_ interesting as they avoided the far-too-knowing look in Blair’s eyes. 

“If you want to keep him stable and not lashing out, that’s our best play. The last thing _any_ of us need is the guide who will probably end up being the most powerful guide _on the planet_ deciding that _we’re_ the enemy instead of who or whatever the psionic plane influenced his emergence to fight at some nebulous point in the future.”

Blair couldn’t help tacking on that last bit just to be an asshole because if Jack was irritating _him_ merely by being himself, his attempts to _manage_ Stiles were going to go over like a lead balloon.

Jack’s expression was more than a _little_ sour, mainly because he couldn’t debate that Blair had a point and Danny had already warned them about the ties between the pair before they’d even found them based on what little they _did_ know about the Wicks.

“Why are you calling him Stiles?” He tried to get off the subject before Sandburg started one of his _real_ tirades. “I thought you never met the kid before he was kidnapped?”

Not to mention that Noah always called him Mischief rather than any other nickname.

“I didn’t.” Blair shrugged. “But we talked in the psionic plane, calming him down, keeping him from letting out a secondary empathic shockwave, and so on. Stiles is what he called himself when we asked for his name. But I’m, like, ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure that was the psionic plane nudging him, because he was disgruntled and confused about _why_ he introduced himself that way.”

“Oh yeah.” Jack grimaced at the mention of psionic _encouragement_ along with the psionic plane in general. “These two are going to be a _delight_ to have under my command, I can already tell.”

“Suck it up buttercup.” Jim’s grin was all teeth. “You’re the one who decided to use your military resources to track them instead of leaving it to the Council. Finders keepers: they’re _your_ problem now.”

Blair grinned, bouncing a little on his toes. “Now we just need to convince _them_ to allow themselves to be managed.”

With the imperatives of Stiles and his dad in play it likely wasn’t going to be a _hard_ sell, if anything he thought getting it pushed through the military brass was going to be the tougher problem to tackle.

“I vote we send in Blair.” Jack said to Jim, cheerfully throwing his current guide counterpart under the bus. There wasn't a current guide with similar authority to Jack's online. Though Sandburg apparently thought this kid might be it. As a result, the shamansal took turns stepping up when there _had_ to be a sole guide to make a decision for their people as a whole. Usually that would be the responsibility of Jack's bonded guide, but when he went from latent to, well, what he is now, he'd bonded for himself first not what conventional wisdom said who he should bond from a power perspective. So it couldn't be Sam who went in with him to try and handle the pair, damnit. Mainly because while he loved his wife to pieces, Sam was only a low-powered epsilon guide, which actually made her really peaceful for Jack to be around given his own gifts, and being around a guide and sentinel like the two in holding - the guide especially - while they weren’t stable in their gifts would be unsettling for her at best and dangerous at worst. And like any sentinel, protecting _his_ guide came before every other instinct or imperative. “I’ll have Sam get on the horn with Hammond and have Senior reactivated and Junior reassigned.”

“Really?” Blair’s tone was nothing short of _judging_ over his highhandedness. “What, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission?”

“More like taking ruthless advantage of one being a commissioned officer and the other’s former enlistment.” Jack’s grin was smarmy and even he knew it. “Being a Colonel _and_ a sentinel has to have some perks. And given how those two act without anchors, having _orders_ to fall back on _might_ actually be good for them as much as I know the very idea chafes at your flower-child soul, Shaman Sandburg.”

“You’re going with me.” Blair was having none of Jack’s usual bullshit this time.

For all that he tried to avoid bad karma, there were times when the Colonel did nothing but _aggravate the shit out of him_ especially since as the shaman closest to Jack, and Jack’s bondmate _not_ having the power to stand toe-to-toe with him though she certainly managed to handle him in every other way, it fell to Blair more often than not to back him up to the Council or in high-powered politics when Jack had to play the “Alpha Prime of Earth” card.

“No.”

“Yes. Or he’s going to Incacha.”

“Shouldn’t that be up to him, wasn’t that what you _just_ got done berating me about?”

“ _Not_ when it comes to his ability to knock out half the guides in a three hundred mile radius, it’s not. _That_ is absolutely my problem to handle as I see fit. So try to rein in your _inner asshole_ for ten minutes and let’s get this done.”

_“Fine.”_

“You know.” Jim commented from where he’d settled in to lean against the wall and watch the fireworks. “Jack’s asshole personality trait isn’t exactly something he hides. Not so _inner._ ”

“Believe me.” Blair groused, narrowing his eyes when the Colonel snapped from irritated to barking a laugh in two seconds. “I am _well aware_ of that. But _they,”_ he nodded to the pair in the iso room. “Are _not_ and I’d like to keep it that way since I’m in no hurry to collect the kind of bad karma that comes from trying to force someone with Stiles’s abilities into a decision against his will, let alone sedating and sending him to Incacha.”

...

_Sentinel and Guide Ward, St. Andrew’s Hospital, New York; Five Days Ago_

Sucking in a deep breath, Mieszko - _Stiles? Why was the psionic plane convinced his name was Stiles? -_ snapped open his eyelids more than a little relieved to see bright lights and white walls rather than the blue-tinged world of the psionic plane.

Given his own preference, he’d _never_ spend another moment in the psionic plane.

Not being able to _smell_ anything or taste the air was extremely disorienting and he didn’t understand how the shaman class guides stood it, let alone their sentinels.

Even with the soft _beep beep beep_ and clicks of sentinel-safe medical equipment in what he was already pegging as a hospital were better than _that_ place.

Perhaps - maybe, possibly - more than a bit of his disgruntlement regarding the psionic plane had more to do with waking up there without warning to a welcome wagon of the most powerful guides _in the fucking world_ than the plane itself, plus what they’d had to _say_ (or in the case of most of them implied the cagey bastards) while he was there.

Either way: it wasn’t exactly the textbook version of an emergence, especially since generally speaking guides were _thought_ to have their abilities activated gradually as the psionic plane decided they were _needed_ instead of the often dangerous or violent events that led to online sentinels.

Waking up online, Stiles found himself _inundated_ with information from his senses and his psionic abilities alike until he managed to slam up his mental shields that his classes as a latent combined with the instruction the shamansal had given him while he was unconscious allowed him to form almost instictively.

It wasn’t pretty and the shields were far more brute force than anything approaching intricate, adept, or elegant but they _worked_ which was the important bit for the moment until he could meditate and work on them in peace.

Because if he was online - and he saw _and felt_ the bandage over the crook of his elbow where someone had done a blood draw. He knew the policies regarding traumatic emergence as good as anyone - and likely better given his position in the Corps working with sentinels and guides in combat zones. As soon as EMS had arrived at the house and found both of them knocked out and online, they would’ve taken them to the nearest ER outfitted for sentinels and guides, and a blood draw would’ve been done to reference against the Council’s DNA database so the Center could be informed of who, exactly, they were dealing with and what sort of abilities they were expected to have.

Accurate prediction of gifts and abilities for sentinels and guides was still at least half guess work, but the DNA markers could give someone studied in S&G DNA analysis a decent idea of where to start for figuring out a new sentinel or guide's classification, skill set, and power.

Given that he’d just met the ruling shamansal of the Council, and before he got his shields up was picking up on the psionic feedback of the entire damn hospital and likely quite a bit of area around it, the best thing that he and his tata could _do_ now that blood had been taken for testing was bullshit the hospital staff and lay low.

Because as soon as his DNA profile hit the Center’s database, there was going to be a whole _new_ shitstorm to deal with, and that was before he got into the clusterfuck that landed them in the ER in the first place.

Whoever those Russian cunts had been, they _clearly_ did not know who they were fucking with.

They’d killed _Daisy._

Sweet, soft, _gift from Mom_ , Daisy.

There was going to be blood for that, even if they hadn’t threatened him.

But they _had._

And any idiot could’ve told the suicidal twats that _no one_ threatened the devil’s own without paying a price.

…


	4. Chapter 4

**Parabellum**

**Chapter Three: A Matter of Practicality**

_“We had a deal!”_ Viggo shouted, staring up into the cold amber eyes of a man who he bought more than one gift for when he was a charming child.

_Konetsko._

Never had that name seemed more _appropriate_ than now as John Wick, Baba Yaga himself, walked away from the parking lot of the Russian Orthodox church Viggo’s family used as a cash house with the location of Viggo’s son.

Traded for his own life.

“You had a deal with _him.”_ Mieszko smiled down at him coldly, both hands steady on his favorite Desert Eagle .357 Magnum. “ _He_ said _he_ wouldn’t kill you if you gave _him_ what _he_ wanted. _I_ never said a goddamn _word._ ”

“Konetsko, please.” Viggo pleaded, hands held up and lying his ass off. “I’ll call it all off, I’ll never come after you, _either_ of you, again. _Konetsko-_ ,”

“Goodbye, Uncle Viggo.”

_Bang._

“You shouldn’t have done that.” John said, even as he clenched his eyes shut and focused his senses - all of them - on his son’s scent and the sound of his heartbeat as they strode away from the scene to their loaner car from Winston. They had plans to make, now that they knew where Iosef was hiding. “It wasn’t our way.”

“ _Your_ way, Tata.” Mieszko corrected, moving close so John could use him to ground his senses, wrapping - clumsily, but managing it, like everything to do with being a guide so far - his shields around his father and sheltering John’s senses inside of them. “I’m not as honorable as you are. Too practical for it. He would’ve never stopped hunting us, he couldn’t afford _not_ to or else he’d lose face. Now all we need is Iosef and it’ll be done.”

“And you don’t think Abram is going to act after we’ve killed his brother and nephew?”

Mieszko gave that due consideration for a long moment, pausing before climbing into the car.

“I really don’t.” He decided after thinking over the few times he’d been around Abram in the past, when John - and by extension Mieszko - worked for the Tarasovs almost exclusively. “He’s too wise to go to war against us both, and too practical himself to _want_ to even if his pride demands it.” He smirked over at his Tata across the center console as John pulled out into traffic. “Not to mention that the Tarasovs are going to be a _bit_ low on manpower for anywhere from a few months up to a year or more. Even if the desire is there: as long as we don’t go after _him_ , I don’t think he’ll come after us.”

John just nodded in concession with his son’s view of the issue as he mentally reviewed the cache of weapons in the trunk.

Unless there was an _actual_ army camped out in the warehouse that Viggo had set up as a trap, they should be just fine.

…

“ _It was just a fucking do-,”_

_Bang._

…

They found them two miles away from the Tarasov warehouse, on the side of the road where John had pulled over so his son could patch up an ugly wound in his thigh.

Neither of them were all that surprised.

The moment they failed to check in at the Center - and then the DNA results came in - they’d both known that the clock was ticking.

Probably one of the reasons his son had killed Viggo, sensing that clock winding down and not wanting to leave a loose end.

Overconfidence and arrogance in his reputation had cost them both Daisy and forced them online.

His son - as Mieszko had himself noted - was too practical for that kind of bullshit after having been burned once.

John assumed it was a character trait he’d either inherited from Stilinski or that was all his own - because he sure as shit hadn’t gotten it from either Claudia or himself.

There were six of them, one more than he’d sensed just out of reach at the Red Circle nightclub.

Three sentinels, two guides, and a mundane that smelled like nothing John had ever run into before. All of them wore black tactical pants and boots, the bulk of TAC vests and weapons clear to his experienced gaze even without the help from his nose to scent out the cordite and gunpowder and steel or his eyes narrowing in on the bulges of the weapon holsters. The mundane was the only non-Caucasian member of the team - and it _was_ clear they were a team, despite one of the sentinels being a half-tick out of step with the rest of them - with a black stocking cap pulled down to his black brows over mocha skin.

A P-90 - not his favorite weapon system _to say the least_ \- but the current standard issue for the Air Force was leveled at both him and Stiles by the seasoned leader who from Mieszko’s wide eyes really _was_ as powerful as John was reading him.

There weren’t many men he’d met in his life who he’d hesitate to take on for one reason or another, and never because of the authority that they exuded.

This sentinel was the first.

John didn’t like it, not one little bit.

But there wasn’t much he could _do_ about it, given the Air Force patches on the jackets the team all sported, unless he wanted to add MPs onto their trail.

Killing Russian mobsters was one thing: taking down American military on a quiet side-street in New York City was something else entirely.

If it were just him, he might risk it even if the way the mundane moved made him cautious regarding just _how_ hard he would be to take down without putting a bullet in his brain, especially with the damage his aging body had racked up over the last few days, sentinel boost to his strength and reflexes aside.

“Lt. Wick.” The leader barked out, full military command lacing his voice. “Time to come in, son.”

Mieszko traded a look with his father, having a silent conversation full of eye flicks and micro-expressions, then stepped away from John’s side after taping down the gauze on his thigh wound, hands up and raised in the universal surrender/no harm position.

Push come to shove: it wasn’t like the man was _wrong._

Or that Mieszko would be able to hide for long, not with his connection to the psionic plane.

The Council was going to find him one way or another.

And over his dead body would John abandon his son, even if one of the sentinels looked an awful lot like the last picture of Noah Stilinski they’d managed to find before his record went classified to hell and gone.

Mieszko knelt, allowing the blond guide to cuff him even as he gave them his one condition.

“We don’t get separated, and are taken directly to the Center.” Mieszko made no bones about what it took for them to go along peacefully. “Dr. Sandburg should already be enroute.”

…

“Hey, neanderthal!” Rodney shouted as one of the standard goons staffing the Center’s security forces tried to put Wick Jr. in a guide-rated iso room instead of together with his, well, his adoptive father he supposed.

Noah was watching the kid with his heart in his eyes, and if the looks the Lieutenant was shooting his way were any sign, he wasn’t entirely lost on why.

Whether that spoke well for the Wicks or poorly, Rodney had yet to decide.

“They go together unless you’d like to join the Tarasovs in a shallow grave!”

“Nice, McKay.” O’Neill snorted, though he didn’t actually chide or reprimand him for keeping said-idiot from getting more for his idiocy than a bloody nose courtesy of Mini-Noah’s elbow.

“Well, it’s not like _everyone_ hasn’t at least heard rumors about these two by now.” Rodney snorted derisively. “Their hunt was _contained_ but not _constrained_ by any means.”

“Why doesn’t everyone go relax and get some shut-eye?” Daniel suggested before his best friend and husband could get going at each other’s throats. Again. For probably the hundredth time since the two met. “We don’t have a timeline - yet - for Dr. Sandburg and Alpha Ellison to arrive despite Guide Wick’s surety that they’re coming, and those two aren’t going to be up to anything but cleaning up and seeing to their wounds for the immediate future.”

Especially as both Wicks had refused to be seen by the Center’s medical staff, asking for a medical kit instead, which had sent up _all kinds_ of red flags to Danny, but given that the father was two steps from snapping still, it was best to leave them alone until Blair arrived to _manage_ them in a way only a shaman could succeed at.

“You too, Noah.” Jack ordered after everyone else - including Sam - had peeled off to return to their temporary rooms in the Center. As he’d taken over the search for the rogue pair, the Center leadership had been more than willing to put them up.

What with them _losing_ the Wicks in the first place.

“That is _my son_ in that iso room.” Noah’s voice was barely above a growl. “Wounded, bleeding, and currently,” Noah leaned around Jack to double-check. “Providing _wound care_ to who is likely an accomplice in his kidnapping at the very _least_ and a hardened killer without remorse at worst. I’m not going _anywhere.”_

“You are.” Jack snapped back, _command_ filling his tone. “You are going to get some goddamned _sleep_ for the first time since McKay got that hit on your son’s profile. Wick isn’t the only one who’s riding the edge right now, Noah, and the last thing we need is the two of you trying - and let’s be realistic, _succeeding_ on his part given the carnage he’s left behind in Little Russia - to kill each other before we know the facts of the situation. Get some sleep and some food and don’t come back for _at least_ six hours. That’s an order, Marine.”

Never had a _yes, sir_ sounded more like _fuck you_ than in that moment and Jack had spent half his career pissing everyone around him off in one way or another.

Just in time too, as not ten minutes later was Jack trading barbs with Blair Sandburg and getting ready to sit down with the deadly duo themselves.

…

_“What should we call you, young Guide?”_

_“M-k-h-c-wi-,” he stuttered several times scowling more ferociously with each trip of his tongue then bit out: “Stiles.”_

_“That’s not what you meant to say, was it?”_

_“No, it’s not. Not even_ close.”

_“And yet, you are not surprised.”_

_“No, I’m not. In fact I have a pretty decent idea of where it came from. Just fuzzy on the how and why this place is pushing it on me.”_

_Yeah, Blair had a pretty decent idea too, as did Jim and at least Incacha._

_Blair had complained about the lost potential in the Stilinski Kidnapping often enough that he’d bet the wily old man had tagged_ Stiles _perhaps even before Blair figured it out._

…

“What do you know about them?” John asked his son after Mieszko finished cleaning, stitching, and bandaging his leg wound, gesturing for him to turn his head and let him clean the scrape across one of Mieszko’s sharp cheekbones.

His son _really_ did look like Claudia, now that he’d seen Stilinski in the flesh there didn’t seem to be anymore of the man in Mieszko than there would be of John.

And yet, while Claudia had been a genius at logistics - her ability to burn the trail that would have led her husband to John was one such proof of that - and John at infiltration and execution, all things that he and the others had ensured to instill in Mieszko, his true brilliance was puzzles of all kinds.

Cyphers, puzzles, encryptions, codes - making and breaking, mysteries, all just _clicking_ into place in Mieszko’s bright mind.

Whether it was planning a nearly-impossible one-man op, or creating contingencies in case of a double-cross, Mieszko could do it all and saw around corners miles away.

John was a blunt object in comparison: extremely effective, but a nuke compared to his son’s dagger in the dark. Both got the job done. But one was arguably less likely to result in collateral damage than the other.

“The General told me after I graduated OCS,” Mieszko spoke slowly, feeling his way around the issue to the meat of it. “That there is a classified project led by an Air Force Colonel named O’Neill. Marines go in, along with a scattering of Air Force, plus civilian scientists. And they only _leave_ under three umbrellas: retirement - often early, remanded to solitary confinement in Leavenworth, or a body bag. Last month at his retirement party, he told me that if Project Blue Book or Sand Blast came knocking, that at least it wouldn’t be boring.”

John almost reared back in shock.

Which considering the source, Mieszko couldn’t blame him, even as he stood, finally done with their first aid, and made his way to the “private” corner of the isolation room with its commode and sink. He couldn’t have the shower or bath that he and his dad rather desperately needed, but he could have a basin clean up and change into the soft sweats the Center had provided, so at least that was something.

His dad followed him, neither having much by way of body modesty given their lifestyles, and any that had remained by the time either of them hit eighteen was rather effectively crushed out by the Corps.

“Hummel said that?” John had never been sure _what_ to think about the grizzled old bastard who ran one of the darkest corners of the Corps BlackOps, in places that the armed forces of the United States had _never_ officially been, but he couldn’t deny that the man was every inch the marine’s Marine. His men had loved him and would’ve followed him into hell itself, Mieszko included. That Hummel’s routine poaching of the best talent based on their performances at basic training had kept Mieszko from being bored in a state-side duty station had only endeared the general to his son further.

Strangely enough, over the last few years, it had seemed to be a state that the older man had reciprocated, even going so far as to endorse Mieszko’s spot at Officer Candidate School.

“Yep.” Mieszko shrugged, tattooed skin normally hidden by clothes flexing with the motion. “I think he was trying to prepare me for the new Commandant to gut the teams and mix things up, including me possibly losing the Hellions,” Mieszko’s personal team that he’d been leading for over a year and a half and named for his call-sign. “Since Gregors is a tool.”

“He’s your commanding officer.”

“He’s a tool.” Mieszko repeated. “If Colonel Sumner hadn’t done an end-run around him, I wouldn’t have gotten my leave. And unless I’m _very_ mistaken, I have a feeling that we’re both about to be conscripted into whatever classified clusterfuck that O’Neill is in charge of, so it doesn’t matter anymore if I call a spade a spade.”

…

By the time everyone was satisfied with the arrangements for handling the Wicks and the results of their “traumatic emergence” which was how SG1 planned to spin it to General Hammond when they were asked to justify bringing them into the program instead of letting the Council handle them, both killers were settled down on the sofa in the iso room and waiting for the axe to fall.

Dressed in identical white t-shirts and navy blue sweatpants, their blood-dirt-sweat dirtied clothes folded neatly in a sealed bag on the coffee table, they watched with similarly blank expressions though while the elder’s was notably grim, the younger’s was betrayed by an avid and intelligent gleam in his eyes.

Which was interesting because while he _looked_ nothing like Noah Stilinski, Jack had seen that exact same expression numerous times before as he was taking the lead on enemy and/or informant interrogations at Cheyenne Mountain.

Jack, Blair, and Jim Ellsion because over _Jack’s_ dead body would Jim be okay with letting his husband and guide into a room with two accomplished killers without him, each came in with their hands full: carrying chairs in the case of Jack and Jim, while Blair had the Center’s files on both Wicks as well as Jack’s set that McKay had put together for the SGC.

Needless to say: Blair’s were _significantly_ lighter on information than Jack’s but thus far the inquisitive Shaman was minding his manners and not snooping through the classified information Jack had at hand once Sandburg passed the file back.

The Wicks just watched them get settled with eerie stillness made even stranger given their blank affects, not even the flick of an eyelash betraying their inner states.

Their pheromones told a _much_ different story, and so did their psionic imprint if Blair’s frown was any sign, but as far as their _controllable_ responses went, the pair might as well be watching a documentary on flamingo migratory habits for all the interest they were showing.

It was damn impressive, and a skill that even the best of the best at the SGC tended to lack, prone as they were to either a soldier’s routine situational awareness and paranoia or a scientist’s rampant curiosity.

If anything, it reminded Jack of CIA or NSA infiltrators he used to have to deal with when running BlackOps, and given the kinds of situations gate teams often ended up in, it made all _kinds_ of ideas spark behind his affable, good ol’ boy, just-a-dumb-Jack mask.

A mask which neither of the Wicks seemed inclined to fall for if they way they focused on _him_ rather than the leading bonded pair of sentinel-and-guide for North America - who anyone who watched even a _little_ bit of news programming would recognize - which only made his reasoning for bringing them into the SGC, Sandburg’s insistence or not, solidify.

They _needed_ assets like this in the program, he’d been trying to recruit Spec-and-BlackOps teams for _years_ but snagging an asset or two here-and-there was one thing, people tended to _ask questions_ if entire teams were suddenly reassigned to a project that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the military complex was in the dark about.

“Well,” Jack kicked off the meeting. “You two are a pair of lucky ducks. For the amount of sheer lethality you unleashed without sanction up and down Little Russia, there was not _one_ actual call out to the police that was classified as anything more than a nuisance call.”

“Criminals tend _not_ to call the cops, Jack.” Jim pointed out from the far side of Blair, the two Alpha Primes having automatically positioned the guide between them. “They retaliate instead.”

Mieszko smirked at that.

“Oh, you think that’s _funny, Lieutenant?”_ Jack barked, not about to let the damn kid think he’s got the upper hand. “We may have a hell of a time proving it in a court of law, but at the moment the military is on the brink of tossing your ass in Leavenworth and throwing away the key anyway!”

“Abram won’t retaliate.” Mieszko told them blithely, ignoring the Colonel’s rant. He wasn’t in uniform and he really didn’t give a fuck how bad O’Neill’s bark was - he wasn’t as bad as Hummel on his best day. “His nephew started something, we finished it. And actions taken as an online sentinel or guide on a hunt trump the UCMJ, _Colonel O’Neill.”_ He stressed the name with a knowing arch of his brows, then glanced over at the others. “Hey, Blair. How’s it hangin’?”

“Hey, Stiles.” Blair shared a grin with the shit-starter, enjoying that the brat had managed to make O’Neill go a most _fetching_ shade of red. “After what you gave me, the paperwork was pushed through. John and Stiles Wick were officially sanctioned to hunt Viggo and Iosef Tarasov for being an _intolerable_ threat to both Pride and Tribe.” He grinned unrepentant down to his toes at Jack. “Sorry, Jack. It was part of the deal Stiles made with the Council.”

_“Mieszko,”_ John chided his son lightly, with one of his patented _disappointed_ looks that had his son grimacing and ducking his head if only for a split-second.

_“Sorry, Tata.”_ Stiles replied in Russian. “ _But there was only ever one way the hunt was going to end. You needed me, but so does my tribe. I had to protect us.”_

_“Don’t apologize for that.”_ John almost growled low in his throat. _“Never for that. But if you wish to work with this man, you shouldn’t start by spiting him.”_

_“Yes, Tata.”_

“Man, I wish Danny was here.” Jack sighed, glancing over at his companions as the Wicks spoke in what he was pretty sure was Russian - not a language any of them apparently spoke but he knew at least three of his people were fluent - or at least conversant in the case of Noah - in. “Pretty sure I’m missing a scolding.”

“Merely reminding my son that he doesn’t have to be contrary _all_ the time, Colonel O’Neill.” John responded once Mieszko glanced away. “He’s stubborn.”

“Comes by it honestly from what I can tell.” O’Neill replied with faux-casualness. “His biological father is one of the stubbornest cusses I’ve ever had the honor of working with.”

“To confirm.” Blair rushed in before a suddenly narrow-eyed Stiles could attempt to blister Jack or tear him into tiny little pieces as his empathic aura went from watchful and tense to rattling-sabers in two seconds flat.

Jim couldn’t exactly blame him.

From their experience with the kid in the psionic plane, his tongue was just as deadly a weapon as everything else in the guide’s arsenal.

“You _are_ aware that your birth name is Mieczysław Stilinski, son of Noah Stilinski and Claudia Stilinski nee Gajos, kidnapped at three years of age?”

“Yeah, we know.” Stiles admitted, crossing his arms over his chest and shrugging. “Pretty sure my egg donor’s maiden name was Wrona, but everything else is right.”

“You don’t consider Claudia your mother?” Blair asked, pressing his advantage for answers that Stiles had been extremely sparing with in the psionic plane.

Stiles snorted. “She kidnapped me from my bio-dad, and then extorted and blackmailed my Tata on threat of death to _both_ of us using one of the scariest people on the planet as a guarantor to ensure that Tata didn’t just take me right back to Noah Stilinski. She was also bug-nuts crazy. _No,_ I don’t consider Claudia my mother.”

On the other side of the two-way glass, Noah buried his head in his hands as he shuddered out a sobbing breath.

There it was: the confirmation of everything he’d assumed since Claudia had turned up dead without their son.

She _had_ taken him.

And given that their son was blunt as a hammer to the face regarding her mental state, he would likely never know _why._

“And you believed that it would cost your life if you returned Stiles to his father and legal guardian?” Jim asked John, gaze laser focused on him and listening to his heartbeat for any sign of lying.

“I knew it.” John admitted. “Her demands were clear: if I didn’t follow exactly what she wanted, I would be killed and Mieszko raised by the same system that turned Claudia into what she was. I wasn’t the only one who owed her a blood-debt. By the time Ruska Roma was done with Mieszko, he wouldn’t have been a child or a guide who would ever emerge. He would’ve been a _weapon_ to be used and discarded. I’m a ruthless killer, but I’ve never killed a child. The Ruska Roma can’t say the same.”

Blair and Jim shared a heavy look at the words _Ruska Roma_ , John inadvertently supplying a bit of information underpinning the whole situation that they’d come to suspect - and that for the good of everyone it was best that Jack and the military weren’t aware of.

They had enough problems without adding the thriving criminal underworld that was far more organized than anyone publicly acknowledged.

“Alright.” Jack decided, watching the byplay that was flying over his head - and rather content to let it do so. He had enough on his plate with the SGC and goa’uld without adding whatever clusterfuck that everyone else in the room were working to keep him in plausible deniability of. “Here’s the offer: John Wick, you’ll be reactivated at your former rank in the Marines. That’ll make you a Gunny, we’re not going to bust your rank down because of your _sanctioned_ hunt. You’ll be signed on with Project Blue Book and will have a full debriefing once we hit Cheyenne Mountain after signing the world’s most in depth non-disclosure agreement. Lt. Wick, you’ll be transferred from your current post, we can always use more men with your skills. Same goes: no _documented_ reprimand for this week’s round of insanity. However, both of you will be confined to base for six months or until I can sleep without having to worry about losing a pair of Marines into the ether. You’ll undergo _extensive_ training on your new skills and abilities, and otherwise be sterling examples of Marine discipline. Clear?”

That was the price for not, as Sandburg said earlier, tossing them on a plane to Peru and making them officially _someone else’s problem._

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir.” Stiles allowed after a _look_ from his Tata. “What about my team, sir?”

Jack flipped open the file on his lap and thumbed to the page on Wick’s current assignment.

“The Hellions, recently lost a member who didn’t reup, commanding officer 1st Lt. Wick, USMC.” Jack read out a summary. He clicked his tongue, even as he kept what Sandburg had told him in the back of his mind. “Well, Sumner isn’t read into the program but unless I miss my guess he has an idea anyway. Might take awhile.” He warned the suddenly _much_ less defensive young man. “But we’ll make it happen.”

Jack watched the pair across from him for a long moment, then asked:

“Anything else?”

“Actually, since you asked…”

…

“Why do I feel wrung out?” Jack complained lightly as he tossed his jacket on the back of a chair in the conference room that his team had co-opted in the Center.

The Wicks had been left to sleep in the iso room’s sentinel-safe king sized bed, neither of them showing any glimmer of discomfort over the close quarters while their contracts, NDAs, and transfer/reactivation were all hashed out.

They’d been at it for hours and even for an Alpha Prime, Jack was feeling the burn of lacking sleep, and not surprised one iota that he found Danny and Rodney hunched over a pair of laptops, Noah and Sam nowhere to be seen though he thought Noah was in his assigned room with the white-noise generator turned on - which any sentinel with an ounce of respect would take as a request for privacy and not attempt to listen past the noise, if they were capable of pushing through it in the first place.

Jack could - but he didn’t.

Noah had been through too much bad shit in his life to have Jack eavesdropping on him and while he’d been in turns furious or distressed throughout this entire tracking endeavor over the last days, nothing had been a red flag as needing intervention.

Another moment’s work had Jack locating Sam’s heartbeat in their own assigned room, not deeply asleep from what he could tell at a distance but not wound up either.

And as soon as he gave his favorite geek - and Danny’s unfortunately McKay-shaped attachment - the okay he knew they’d take handling the paperwork and minutiae for the deal he and the Council had made with the Wicks.

Jack would never admit it, but for all the hassle that had gone into finding them - and the questions he thought they’d never answer about their backgrounds and connections - he was moderately _excited_ to have a pair of assets with their skills coming into the SGC.

If anyone could give the goa’uld bastards problems, it was always wild cards.

Like Jack and Danny and McKay.

Or, as the case was now, a pair of Marines with significant training and ruthless to their cores.

Much as he hated to think it, Danny and Sam’s bleeding hearts had gotten them _into_ just as much trouble as they’d ever solved, and the newest guide signed onto the program _definitely_ didn’t have that same problem.

“Because from what I can tell,” Rodney snarked out an answer to Jack’s rhetorical question. “Those two learned how to bargain and negotiate contracts from some _truly_ scary people.”

“What have you found?”

“Well,” Rodney drawled, smugly.

Which just made Jack want to punch him in the face but that was a common reaction to McKay, even with Danny around to play geek translator.

“The mentions of the Director and the Ruska Roma confirmed information we already suspected. Wick Sr. was likely smuggled out of Eastern Europe during the cleanses - based on the way he spoke Russian despite his clear knowledge of their underground activities, it wasn’t a perfect accent, I’d say Belarus.” Danny said before his sentinel could irritate Jack into snapping at him when he was already on the edge. “What little I’ve heard about Ruska Roma from Dr. Sandburg says that they were right: if Wick didn’t follow through on the debt he owed Mrs. Stilinski, they _absolutely_ would’ve killed him.”

“Why does Sandburg have information on a crime syndicate?” Rodney asked his husband, frowning lightly in confusion, put out that he might’ve missed something. “Not exactly the sort of connections I’d expect for a cop’s partner to have, let alone a Shaman for that matter.”

“You probably never had reason to know about it.” Danny said tactfully dancing around his bondmate’s habit of ignoring information that wasn’t applicable to areas of his interest. “But there was a pretty large movement of children and teens from former Soviet-Bloc territories after the USSR’s collapse.”

“A lot of it was handled by criminal organizations.” Jack admitted, knowing about it because it was the sort of thing he saw in places like Bosnia that the military had had a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” policy regarding. As terrible as it was, there were plenty of times that while people like the humanitarian organizations talked a good talk, it was often people like criminals that had the contacts, skills, and knowledge to move the likes of people endangered by ethnic cleansing or the forced “protection” of latent sentinels and guides.

At a _cost_ generally speaking, but they still managed it nonetheless.

“Not all the kids were handed over to adoption in the States or wherever else they were smuggled. I’d be willing to bet that the ones that showed particular _traits_ that were valuable to the organizations were folded in, like Wick and his carnage.”

“And genuine fear of what the Director would’ve done to the kid without supervision.” Rodney admitted, though he wasn’t happy about it. Much as it galled, from what he and the rest could tell, neither Wick had outright lied _once._

Though they were clearly skilled at dancing and dodging around subjects, if not outright stonewalling.

“Hammond has already sent through his approval on both the transfer and the reactivation.” Danny announced, changing the subject before Jack could truly begin to brood. “He’s also gotten approval for a squad of grunts from the nearby base to meet us at the Wicks’ place tomorrow with supplies to pack them up and get them relocated.”

“Do I want to know how you know that, Danny?” Jack asked with a little laugh in his tone, a knowing _look_ shot at Rodney who just blinked at him in mock-innocence all the explanation he really needed.

“Best not.”

“Alright then, anything else before I get a couple hours and all the bullshit starts again?”

“I’m pretty sure the kid is a bonafide genius.” Mckay said, cranky and not even trying to hide it regarding the subject. “Especially at the art of staying under the radar.”

“Why do you say that?” Jack asked mildly when all he wanted to do was cuss.

“Two degrees in three years since joining the Marines.” Rodney ripped through the facts at his usual highspeed, only a _bit_ excited about the implications of some of it even if those same implications were headache inducing for Jack. Or maybe especially because of that. “And they’re not fluff degrees either for all that they’re not something useful.” Like _science._ “Bachelor and Masters degrees, both from the Marine Corps University, in Operations Research and War Studies respectively.”

Jack let out a little whistle. That was seven years of regular college completed in less than half the time while also going through his Corps training and pulling missions. He’d known the kid was smart, that was plain to anyone with functioning _eyes_ , and with a mouth like that he’d have to be quick, but...jeez.

That was some Danny/Sam nonsense, albeit not in the ranks of McKay when he was actually invested in something.

“ _And,”_ Rodney got to the good part. “On the Wicks’ home computer I dug deep and found records of previous academic endeavors, all under aliases that match up with other information we’ve found out about him. Colonel.” Rodney fixed him with a serious stare, the sort of thing he never resorted to unless it was about hard science or Danny. “If he _actually_ did what I think he did? He has to have some form of photographic or eidetic memory. No matter _how_ intelligent he is otherwise, even _I_ would have a difficult time duplicating his turnaround times on degrees.”

“How many degrees are we talkin’ about?” Jack asked, frowning.

_“Seven_ ,” Rodney said in a total deadpan. “Not in his name, not officially attached to him, and no doctorates,” _yet_ , if the kid really knew what he knew, Rodney was stealing him for the science division, he didn’t _care_ how much the Marines creamed themselves over his ability to blow things up. “Likely to avoid having to defend a dissertation in person. The way they manipulated the education system to avoid drawing attention to Mini-Stilinski is really quite cunning and skilled. I’ll want to quiz him, see if he actually knows what the records say he does, though it’s possible some of them were done by Wick Sr. and not Mini-Stilinski. But if all this was done by our newest jarhead, then he can complete a full bachelor’s degree in a year and a master’s in two. His memory, if that’s so, it’s…” Rodney was rarely flummoxed but the sheer implications of that kind of capability being wasted on a jarhead instead of a scientist was utter _blasphemy_ and Rodney was an atheist.

“Danny?” Jack double-checked with his best-friend, not willing to immediately jump on the child prodigy train for all that he was surrounded by them far more than most people on the planet given the SGC’s policy of stealing the best and brightest with promises of _space_ and _exploration_ and _alien technology._ “That true?”

“I couldn’t do it.” Danny felt no shame in admitting as much. “It _would_ be a turn around similar to my abilities to learn languages, just focused in a different fashion or a different portion of his brain. Ones that build on previous knowledge I can build at least a basic understanding of in weeks and have fluency in a year or less, anything from scratch and it’d take anywhere up to a couple years and I might have context or accent issues. I know Dr. Reid who used to study and teach at CalTech could manage a similar learning speed and he has a technically lower IQ than Rodney but has an eidetic memory and scary reading speed.”

“Carson nearly _begged_ for samples and scans from Dr. Reid.” Rodney mentioned with a smirk regarding his main friend inside the SGC other than Danny and his second in the astrophysics labs Radek Zelenka. “Shut down _hard_. He, like many of us, has no desire to be put under a microscope regarding how we can do what we do.”

And...Jack was officially done for the moment, the implications of that was more than he wanted to think about, especially with a wife and guide who wasn’t exactly _average_ in any way, shape, or form.

“You can ambush the kid after we get them read in and it becomes treason for him to bolt.” He attempted to lay down the law. But with Danny and McKay, he gave himself a fifty-fifty shot on whether it would actually work. “Don’t scare him off right after we got our hands on him or Noah will shoot you in the ass.”

Jack probably found McKay’s offended squawks and Danny’s flustered denials more entertaining than the probably should but: sue him.

It had been a long few days.

He deserved a bit of levity before tomorrow.

There was nothing like packing up someone’s entire life on the back of _two_ traumas to kill the mood.

And that was _exactly_ what they were setting themselves up for when they returned to the Wick house.

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of things:
> 
> I've altered Viggo's monologue to Iosef about John, but kept it mostly intact because, well, it's awesome.
> 
> Yes, Viggo noted that Stiles is two-natured, i.e. intersexed or omega but this world *doesn't* have an actual A/B/O thing going on, it's an *extra* to some sentinels and guides and has to do with the genetic experimentation the Alterans/Ancients dabbled with regarding humanity.
> 
> Guide to John Wick Terms and Characters:
> 
> The High Table - Ruling body of the entire criminal underworld, said to be older than any civilian government and with a reach and authority that is utter and complete over everyone and everything that operates “Under the Table.”
> 
> The Continental - Organization of elite assassins and their support personnel hiding in plain sight as a chain of hotels. Handles everything from mints the gold coins used as underworld currency to body disposal to running the safe havens of the Continental locations. The hotels are considered “consecrated” by the High Table and no blood or work is allowed to be shed there with the exception of by Continental staff per the rules set down by the High Table. Members of the hotel are allowed access to all of the services provided by the organization while being excommunicated is a death sentence - usually with an accompanying bounty placed on the ex-member’s head by either Management or the High Table itself.
> 
> Ruska Roma - A criminal organization with links to Eastern Europe, run by a woman known as the Director. New York headquarters is a large theater.
> 
> The Director - head of the Ruska Roma, implied to be Romani, an older woman of indeterminate age portrayed by Angelica Huston in John Wick 3, known to help orphans escape Eastern Europe and bring them to the States in exchange for their loyalty, training them to be part of the organization.
> 
> Winston - Manager of the Continental New York, old friend to John Wick.
> 
> Charon - Concierge of the Continental New York.
> 
> Marcus - Professional assassin, member of the Continental, ex-Marine who served with and is considered the friend of John Wick, expert sniper.
> 
> Marker - Markers are a blood oath between two individuals. Also, markers are formally witnessed or recognized; It is not just any blood oath.
> 
> A marker is a small round metal object indicating the debt of a blood oath between two individuals. Opening in the middle to reveal a divided surface, the debtor presses a bloody thumbprint on one side to commit an oath is owed, while the debtee likewise presses their bloody thumb to the other side to indicate when an oath has been fulfilled.
> 
> Records of blood oaths are registered and tracked by The Continental, under the supervision of Winston. He tracks the issuance and redemption of blood oaths in his own leather-bound record book.
> 
> [from https://john-wick.fandom.com/wiki/Markers]


End file.
